lands.  The Governor, constrained by his instructions and his bonds, rejected it.  “I can only say,” he told them, “that I will readily pass a bill for striking any sum in paper money the present exigency may require, provided funds are established for sinking the same in five years.”  Messages long and acrimonious were exchanged between the parties.  The Assembly, had they chosen, could easily have raised money enough by methods not involving the point in dispute; but they thought they saw in the crisis a means of forcing the Governor to yield.  The Quakers had an alternative motive:  if the Governor gave way, it was a political victory; if he stood fast, their non-resistance principles would triumph, and in this triumph their ascendency as a sect would be confirmed.  The debate grew every day more bitter and unmannerly.  The Governor could not yield; the Assembly would not.  There was a complete deadlock.  The Assembly requested the Governor “not to make himself the hateful instrument of reducing a free people to the abject state of vassalage."[344] As the raising of money and the control of its expenditure was in their hands; as he could not prorogue or dissolve them, and as they could adjourn on their own motion to such time as pleased them; as they paid his support, and could withhold it if he offended them,—­which they did in the present case,—­it seemed no easy task for him to reduce them to vassalage.  “What must we do,” pursued the Assembly, “to please this kind governor, who takes so much pains to render us obnoxious to our sovereign and odious to our fellow-subjects?  If we only tell him that the difficulties he meets with are not owing to the causes he names,—­which indeed have no existence,—­but to his own want of skill and abilities for his station, he takes it extremely amiss, and say ‘we forget all decency to those in authority.’  We are apt to think there is likewise some decency due to the Assembly as a part of the government; and though we have not, like the Governor, had a courtly education, but are plain men, and must be very imperfect in our politeness, yet we think we have no chance of improving by his example."[345] Again, in another Message, the Assembly, with a thrust at Morris himself, tell him that colonial governors have often been “transient persons, of broken fortunes, greedy of money, destitute of all concern for those they govern, often their enemies, and endeavoring not only to oppress, but to defame them."[346] In such unseemly fashion was the battle waged.  Morris, who was himself a provincial, showed more temper and dignity; though there was not too much on either side.  “The Assembly,” he wrote to Shirley, “seem determined to take advantage of the country’s distress to get the whole power of government into their own hands.”  And the Assembly proclaimed on their part that the Governor was taking advantage of the country’s distress to reduce the province to “Egyptian bondage.”

[Footnote 342:  Morris to Shirley, 16 Aug. 1755.]