The methods employed by this board were varied.  All laws passed by American legislatures came before it for review as a matter of routine.  If it found an act unsatisfactory, it recommended to the king the exercise of his veto power, known as the royal disallowance.  Any person who believed his personal or property rights injured by a colonial law could be heard by the board in person or by attorney; in such cases it was the practice to hear at the same time the agent of the colony so involved.  The royal veto power over colonial legislation was not, therefore, a formal affair, but was constantly employed on the suggestion of a highly efficient agency of the crown.  All this was in addition to the powers exercised by the governors in the royal provinces.

=Judicial Control.=—­Supplementing this administrative control over the colonies was a constant supervision by the English courts of law.  The king, by virtue of his inherent authority, claimed and exercised high appellate powers over all judicial tribunals in the empire.  The right of appeal from local courts, expressly set forth in some charters, was, on the eve of the Revolution, maintained in every colony.  Any subject in England or America, who, in the regular legal course, was aggrieved by any act of a colonial legislature or any decision of a colonial court, had the right, subject to certain regulations, to carry his case to the king in council, forcing his opponent to follow him across the sea.  In the exercise of appellate power, the king in council acting as a court could, and frequently did, declare acts of colonial legislatures duly enacted and approved, null and void, on the ground that they were contrary to English law.

=Imperial Control in Operation.=—­Day after day, week after week, year after year, the machinery for political and judicial control over colonial affairs was in operation.  At one time the British governors in the colonies were ordered not to approve any colonial law imposing a duty on European goods imported in English vessels.  Again, when North Carolina laid a tax on peddlers, the council objected to it as “restrictive upon the trade and dispersion of English manufactures throughout the continent.”  At other times, Indian trade was regulated in the interests of the whole empire or grants of lands by a colonial legislature were set aside.  Virginia was forbidden to close her ports to North Carolina lest there should be retaliation.

In short, foreign and intercolonial trade were subjected to a control higher than that of the colony, foreshadowing a day when the Constitution of the United States was to commit to Congress the power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce and commerce with the Indians.  A superior judicial power, towering above that of the colonies, as the Supreme Court at Washington now towers above the states, kept the colonial legislatures within the metes and bounds of established law.  In the thousands of appeals, memorials, petitions, and complaints, and the rulings and decisions upon them, were written the real history of British imperial control over the American colonies.