Mansfield considered the bare law of the question to be, and how necessary it had become to give some clear and decisive exposition of its principles, which like so much of English law, were altogether out of keeping with existing facts. The general result of that judgment, given upon an appeal coming from the island of Grenada—one of the cessions of the Treaty of 1763—was, that between colonies acquired by conquest or by cession, and those acquired by occupancy, i.e. what were popularly termed "settled colonies," there was a legal distinction; that whereas, in the former, the Crown could legislate by the sole royal prerogative exercised in its executive capacity in subordination to the legislative power of the Imperial Parliament, in the latter a representative Assembly must share in legislation, including taxation; the legislative power of the Assembly however, to be always held in subordination to that of the Parliament.[1] The American colonies clearly fell into the latter category.
It was consistently with this doctrine of the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament that the Colonial system had bound the trade between England and America with a complicated series of chains and fetters rendered barely tolerable by extensive smuggling and the open connivance in many cases of the port authorities at the violation of their own rules. But the matter was not to end there. The Board of Trade had observed with satisfaction that, "upon a consideration of the past history of the Colonies, not only their latitude in trade but also their government had from time to time been limited and restrained so as to render them more dependent on England. Thus the Acts of Navigation had restrained the powers of trade granted by the charter of Maryland. Thus too the Crown had confined the powers of trade within certain limits in the case of Pennsylvania; and several other limitations in point of government were contained in its charter, which found no place in those of Maryland, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, as for example the obligation
- ↑ Campbell v. Hall, 1 vol. of Cowper's Reports. Sir Edward Creasy in his Constitutions of the Britannic Empire, has given a précis of the case.
