[Sidenote:  His speech in the Parson’s Cause, 1763.]

105.  The Parson’s Cause, 1763.—­The next important case arose in Virginia and came about in this way.  The Virginians made a law regulating the salaries of clergymen in the colony.  The king vetoed the law.  The Virginians paid no heed to the veto.  The clergy men appealed to the courts and the case of one of them was selected for trial.  Patrick Henry, a prosperous young lawyer, stated the opinions of the Virginians in a speech which made his reputation.  The king, he said, had no right to veto a Virginia law that was for the good of the people.  To do so was an act of tyranny, and the people owed no obedience to a tyrant.  The case was decided for the clergyman.  For the law was clearly on his side.  But the jurymen agreed with Henry.  They gave the clergyman only one farthing damages, and no more clergymen brought cases into the court.  The king’s veto was openly disobeyed.

[Sidenote:  Proclamation of 1763. McMaster, 110.]

106.  The King’s Proclamation of 1763.—­In the same year that the Parson’s Cause was decided the king issued a proclamation which greatly lessened the rights of Virginia and several other colonies to western lands.  Some of the old charter lines, as those of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and the Carolinas had extended to the Pacific Ocean.  By the treaty of 1763 (p. 69) the king, for himself and his subjects, abandoned all claim to lands west of Mississippi River.  Now in the Proclamation of 1763 he forbade the colonial governors to grant any lands west of the Alleghany Mountains.  The western limit of Virginia and the Carolinas was fixed.  Their pioneers could not pass the mountains and settle in the fertile valleys of the Ohio and its branches.

CHAPTER 12

TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION

[Sidenote:  George III.]

[Sidenote:  George Grenville.]

[Sidenote:  The British Parliament.]

107.  George III and George Grenville.—­George III became king in 1760.  He was a narrow, stupid, well-meaning, ignorant young man of twenty-one.  He soon found in George Grenville a narrow, dull, well-meaning lawyer, a man who would do what he was told.  So George Grenville became the head of the government.  To him the law was the law.  If he wished to do a thing and could find the law for it, he asked for nothing more.  His military advisers told him that an army must be kept in America for years.  It was Grenville’s business to find the money to support this army.  Great Britain was burdened with a national debt.  The army was to be maintained, partly, at least, for the protection of the colonists.  Why should they not pay a part of the cost of maintaining it?  Parliament was the supreme power in the British Empire.  It controlled the king, the church, the army, and the navy.  Surely a Parliament that had all this power could tax the colonists.  At all events, Grenville thought it could, and Parliament passed the Stamp Act to tax them.