an insolent and cruel mockery at the annihilation of the town of Boston.  By the act for the suppression of riots and tumults in the town of Boston, [14 G.3.] passed also in the last session of Parliament, a murder committed there, is, if the Governor pleases, to be tried in the court of King’s Bench, in the island of Great Britain, by a jury of Middlesex.  The witnesses, too, on receipt of such a sum as the Governor shall think it reasonable for them to expend, are to enter into recognisance to appear at the trial.  This is, in other words, taxing them to the amount of their recognisance; and that amount may be whatever a Governor pleases.  For who does his Majesty think can be prevailed on to cross the Atlantic, for the sole purpose of bearing evidence to a fact?  His expenses are to be borne, indeed, as they shall be estimated by a Governor; but who are to feed the wife and children whom he leaves behind, and who have had no other subsistence but his daily labor?  Those epidemical disorders, too, so terrible in a foreign climate, is the cure of them to be estimated among the articles of expense, and their danger to be warded off by the almighty power of a Parliament?  And the wretched criminal, if he happen to have offended on the American side, stripped of his privilege of trial by peers of his vicinage, removed from the place where alone full evidence could be obtained, without money, without counsel, without friends, without exculpatory proof, is tried before Judges predetermined to condemn.  The cowards who would suffer a countryman to be torn from the bowelss of their society, in order to be thus offered a sacrifice to Parliamentary tyranny, would merit that everlasting infamy now fixed on the authors of the act!  A clause, for a similar purpose, had been introduced into an act passed in the twelfth year of his Majesty’s reign, entitled, “an act for the better securing and preserving his Majesty’s dock-yards, magazines, ships, ammunition, and stores;” against which, as meriting the same censures, the several colonies have already protested.

’That these are the acts of power, assumed by a body of men foreign to our constitutions, and unacknowledged by our laws; against which we do, on behalf of the inhabitants of British America, enter this our solemn and determined protest.  And we do earnestly entreat his Majesty, as yet the only mediatory power between the several states of the British empire, to recommend to his Parliament of Great Britain, the total revocation of these acts, which, however nugatory they be, may yet prove the cause of further discontents and jealousies among us.