George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

[131] charter, and, with the approbation of Murray,¹ all

chap. VI.} 1754.

authority for two years emanated from the king alone. In 1754,² when the first royal governor with a royal council entered upon office, a legislative assembly convened under the sanction of his commission. The crown instituted the courts, and appointed executive officers and judges, with fixed salaries paid by England; but the people, intrenching itself in the representative body, and imitating the precedents of older colonies, gained vigor in its infancy to restrain every form of delegated authority.

South Carolina prospered and was happy. Its fiery people, impatient of foreign restraint, easily kindling into a flame, had increased their power by every method of encroachment on the executive, and every claim to legislative self-direction; but they did not excite English jealousy by competing with English industry, or engaging largely in illicit trade; and British legislation was ever lenient to their interests. In favor of rice, whose culture annually covered their inexhaustibly fertile swamps with its expanse of verdure, the Laws of Navigation were mitigated; the planting of indigo, which grew wild among their woodlands, was cherished, like the production of naval stores, by a bounty from the British exchequer; and they thought it in return no hardship to receive through, England even foreign manufactures, which, by the system of partial drawbacks, came to them burdened with a tax, yet at a less cost than to the consumer in the metropolis. They had