They arraigned the Act of Parliament of 4th Geo. III.,
extending admiralty jurisdiction and depriving the colonists of native
juries, as a distinction staring them in the face which was made
between the subject in Great Britain and the subject in America,--the
Parliament in one section guarding the people of the realm, and
securing to them trial by jury and the law of the land, and in the
next section depriving Americans of those important rights; and this
distinction was pronounced a brand of disgrace upon every American, a
degradation below the rank of an Englishman. While the instructions
claimed for each subject in America equality of political right with
each subject in England, they claimed also for the General Court the
dignity of a free assembly, and declared the first object of their
labors to be a removal of "those cannon and guards and that clamorous
parade that had been daily about the Court-House since the arrival of
His Majesty's troops."
The country towns, which now responded so nobly to the demand of the
hour, were controlled by freemen. Among these it was rare to find any
who could not read and write; they were mostly independent
freeholders, with person and property guarded, as it used to be said
in the Boston journals of the time, not by one law for the peasant and
another law for the prince, but by equal law for all; they exercised
liberty of thought and political action, and their proceedings, as
they appeared in the public prints, gave great alarm to the Governor.
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