By this power, wherever it subsists, all legislation and jurisdiction is animated and maintained.  From this all legal rights are emanations, which, whether equitably or not, may be legally recalled.  It is not infallible, for it may do wrong; but it is irresistible, for it can be resisted only by rebellion, by an act which makes it questionable, what shall be thenceforward the supreme power.

An English colony is a number of persons, to whom the king grants a charter, permitting them to settle in some distant country, and enabling them to constitute a corporation enjoying such powers as the charter grants, to be administered in such forms as the charter prescribes.  As a corporation, they make laws for themselves; but as a corporation, subsisting by a grant from higher authority, to the control of that authority they continue subject.

As men are placed at a greater distance from the supreme council of the kingdom, they must be intrusted with ampler liberty of regulating their conduct by their own wisdom.  As they are more secluded from easy recourse to national judicature, they must be more extensively commissioned to pass judgment on each other.

For this reason our more important and opulent colonies see the appearance, and feel the effect, of a regular legislature, which, in some places, has acted so long with unquestioned authority, that it has forgotten whence that authority was originally derived.

To their charters the colonies owe, like other corporations, their political existence.  The solemnities of legislation, the administration of justice, the security of property, are all bestowed upon them by the royal grant.  Without their charter, there would be no power among them, by which any law could be made, or duties enjoined; any debt recovered, or criminal punished.

A charter is a grant of certain powers or privileges, given to a part of the community for the advantage of the whole, and is, therefore, liable, by its nature, to change or to revocation.  Every act of government aims at publick good.  A charter, which experience has shown to be detrimental to the nation, is to be repealed; because general prosperity must always be preferred to particular interest.  If a charter be used to evil purposes, it is forfeited, as the weapon is taken away which is injuriously employed.

The charter, therefore, by which provincial governments are constituted, may be always legally, and, where it is either inconvenient in its nature, or misapplied in its use, may be equitably repealed; by such repeal the whole fabrick of subordination is immediately destroyed, and the constitution sunk at once into a chaos; the society is dissolved into a tumult of individuals, without authority to command, or obligation to obey, without any punishment of wrongs, but by personal resentment, or any protection of right, but by the hand of the possessor.

A colony is to the mother-country, as a member to the body, deriving its action and its strength from the general principle of vitality; receiving from the body, and communicating to it, all the benefits and evils of health and disease; liable, in dangerous maladies, to sharp applications, of which the body, however, must partake the pain; and exposed, if incurably tainted, to amputation, by which the body, likewise, will be mutilated.