213 
chap, ii,] WEST INDIES. 
authority of parliament lias been, and may again 
be constitutionally exerted, in regard to the colo¬ 
nies, without abolishing every’ restriction on the 
part of governors, and extinguishing every right on 
the part of the governed Previously excluding, 
* Such is the general system of the laws for regulating the com¬ 
merce of the colonies ; and I will now add some instances of parlia¬ 
mentary interference, on other occasions, which I conceive to be con¬ 
sistent with the principles I have laid down. Thus, when the first 
princes of the Stewart family affected to consider the plantations as 
their own demesnes, with a v ew of making them a source of revenue 
to themselves, the commons opposed and defeated a claim which, if 
ft had been established, might have rendered the king independent of 
the British parliament. (See the Journals of 1624 and 1625, and 
Vaughan's Reports, 402). Nobody doubts the propriety of the com¬ 
mons’ interposition on this occasion. Again, we have seen in the 
History of Barbadoes, a great minister (the Earl of Clarendon) im¬ 
peached by the house of commons, among other things, for intro¬ 
ducing an arbitrary government into the plantations. It was never 
alledged, that the house in this business exceeded the limits of its pro¬ 
per and constitutional functions. Soon after the revolution, some 
laws were passed by one or two of the provincial assemblies, which 
were supposed to weaken the chain that holds the colonies dependent 
on the mother-country. This gave occasion to a clause in the 7 and 
3 of W. III. c.22, which declares, tc that all laws (meaning the 
laws for regulating trade) which are any ways repugnant to the laws 
of England, shall be deemed null and and void.” This, though a 
strong, was certainly a justifiable exertion of English supremacy. By 
the 6 Anne, c. 30, a general post office is established in the colonies. 
This maybe deemed an internal regulation; but as Dr. Franklin ob¬ 
served, it was a regulation which one colony could not make for ano¬ 
ther; and, as the revenue which it raised was considered in the nature 
of a quantum meruit, a reward for service, (a service too which the co¬ 
lonists were not bound to accept, for a man might, if he had thought 
proper, have sent his letters as before by a private messenger), the aft 
was submitted to. After this, some laws were passed which were 
