=Contests between Legislatures and Governors.=—­As may be imagined, many and bitter were the contests between the royal and proprietary governors and the colonial assemblies.  Franklin relates an amusing story of how the Pennsylvania assembly held in one hand a bill for the executive to sign and, in the other hand, the money to pay his salary.  Then, with sly humor, Franklin adds:  “Do not, my courteous reader, take pet at our proprietary constitution for these our bargain and sale proceedings in legislation.  It is a happy country where justice and what was your own before can be had for ready money.  It is another addition to the value of money and of course another spur to industry.  Every land is not so blessed.”

It must not be thought, however, that every governor got off as easily as Franklin’s tale implies.  On the contrary, the legislatures, like Caesar, fed upon meat that made them great and steadily encroached upon executive prerogatives as they tried out and found their strength.  If we may believe contemporary laments, the power of the crown in America was diminishing when it was struck down altogether.  In New York, the friends of the governor complained in 1747 that “the inhabitants of plantations are generally educated in republican principles; upon republican principles all is conducted.  Little more than a shadow of royal authority remains in the Northern colonies.”  “Here,” echoed the governor of South Carolina, the following year, “levelling principles prevail; the frame of the civil government is unhinged; a governor, if he would be idolized, must betray his trust; the people have got their whole administration in their hands; the election of the members of the assembly is by ballot; not civil posts only, but all ecclesiastical preferments, are in the disposal or election of the people.”

Though baffled by the “levelling principles” of the colonial assemblies, the governors did not give up the case as hopeless.  Instead they evolved a system of policy and action which they thought could bring the obstinate provincials to terms.  That system, traceable in their letters to the government in London, consisted of three parts:  (1) the royal officers in the colonies were to be made independent of the legislatures by taxes imposed by acts of Parliament; (2) a British standing army was to be maintained in America; (3) the remaining colonial charters were to be revoked and government by direct royal authority was to be enlarged.

Such a system seemed plausible enough to King George III and to many ministers of the crown in London.  With governors, courts, and an army independent of the colonists, they imagined it would be easy to carry out both royal orders and acts of Parliament.  This reasoning seemed both practical and logical.  Nor was it founded on theory, for it came fresh from the governors themselves.  It was wanting in one respect only.  It failed to take account of the fact that the American people were growing strong in the practice of self-government and could dispense with the tutelage of the British ministry, no matter how excellent it might be or how benevolent its intentions.