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England.
The appeal was not admitted.
‘The char-
ter,’ he urged, ‘does but create a corporation within the realm, subject to English laws.’—‘Plantations,’ replied the court, ‘are above the rank of an ordinary corporation; they have been esteemed other than towns, yea, than many cities.
Colonies are the foundations of great commonwealths.
It is the fruit of pride and folly to despise the day of small things.’
To the parliament of England the legislature remonstrated with the noblest frankness against any assertion of the paramount authority of that body.
‘An order from
England,’ say they,
is prejudicial to our chartered liberties, and to our well-being in this remote part of the world.
Times may be changed; for all things here below are subject to vanity, and other princes or parliaments may arise.
Let not succeeding generations have cause to lament and say, England sent our fathers forth with happy liberties, which they enjoyed many years, notwithstanding all the enmity and opposition of the prelacy, and other potent adversaries, and yet these liberties were lost in the season when England itself recovered its own. We rode out the dangers of the sea; shall we perish in port?
We have not admitted appeals to your authority, being assured they cannot stand with the liberty and power granted us by our charter, and would be destructive to all government.
These considerations are not new to the high court of parliament; the records whereof bear witness of the wisdom and faithfulness of our ancestors in that great council, who, in those times of darkness, when they acknowledged a supremacy in the Roman bishops, in all causes ecclesiastical, yet would not allow appeals to Rome.
The wisdom and experience of that great counc<*>
