[Sidenote:  The Americans never admitted the supremacy of parliament;] The Americans never regarded parliament as possessing any rightful authority over their internal affairs.  When the earliest colonies were founded, it was the general theory that the American wilderness was part of the king’s private domain and not subject to the control of parliament.  This theory lived on in America, but died out in England.  On the one hand the Americans had their own legislatures, which stood to them in the place of parliament.  The authority of parliament was derived from the fact that it was a representative body, but it did not represent Americans.  Accordingly the Americans held that the relation of each American colony to Great Britain was like the relation between England and Scotland in the seventeenth century.  England and Scotland then had the same king, but separate parliaments, and the English parliament could not make laws for Scotland.  Such is the connection between Sweden and Norway at the present day; they have the same king, but each country legislates for itself.  So the American colonists held that Virginia, for example, and Great Britain had the same king, but each its independent legislature; and so with the other colonies,—­there were thirteen parliaments in America, each as sovereign within its own sphere as the parliament at Westminster, and the latter had no more right to tax the people of Massachusetts than the Massachusetts legislature had to tax the people of Virginia.

In one respect, however, the Americans did admit that parliament had a general right of supervision over all parts of the British empire.[6] Maritime commerce seemed to be as much the affair of one part of the empire as another, and it seemed right that it should be regulated by the central parliament at Westminster.  Accordingly the Americans did not resist custom-house taxes as long as they seemed to be imposed for purely commercial purposes; but they were quick to resist direct taxation, and custom-house taxes likewise, as soon as these began to form a part of schemes for extending the authority of parliament over the colonies.

[Footnote 6:  except in the regulation of maritime commerce.]

In England, on the other hand, this theory that the Americans were subject to the king’s authority but not to that of parliament naturally became unintelligible after the king himself had become virtually subject to parliament.[7] The Stuart kings might call themselves kings by the grace of God, but since 1688 the sovereigns of Great Britain owe their seat upon the throne to an act of parliament.

[Footnote 7:  In England there grew up the theory of the imperial supremacy of parliament.]

To suppose that the king’s American subjects were not amenable to the authority of parliament seemed like supposing that a stream could rise higher than its source.  Besides, after 1700 the British empire began to expand in all parts of the world, and the business of parliament became more and more imperial.  It could make laws for the East India Company; why not, then, for the Company of Massachusetts Bay?