was dependent on the Assembly, not merely for the supplies which a period of war or other special causes might render necessary, but for the ordinary expenses of Government, including his own salary and those of every officer in the Colony.
In England the civil list was given to the Crown for life at the beginning of each reign, and the sum so voted considering the uses to which it was applied, was a source of power even in a country where it bore but a small proportion to the whole expenses of Government. But in most of the colonies an annual vote for the expenses of Government carefully appropriated the sums voted to the holders of each individual civil office—the practice resembling the present procedure of the House of Commons in regard to the Civil Service estimates—so that the recipient of the money and the amount he received could be publicly known. It was the desire of the Governors to obtain a large and permanent revenue, not depending on annual votes and not so carefully appropriated as to deprive them of all latitude in its expenditure; and their patrons at home found in the alleged unwillingness of the colonies to bear their due proportion of joint expenses, an excuse to join the Governors in the demands which the latter had long been making to be set free from the trammels of the Colonial Constitutions, either by the Assemblies voting a permanent revenue or in default by the Parliament of England interfering over the heads of the Assemblies.
Affairs had about this time come to a crisis. England had gone to war with France for the possession of the valleys of the Mississippi and the Ohio and had prevailed.[1] But the struggle had been costly, and it was anticipated that fresh expenses would be incurred in the settlement of the new territories, the benefits of the acquisition of which were justly held to belong as much to the States as to the mother-country, and the costs of their conquest and
- ↑ On the history of the conflicting claims to the Hinterland of the Atlantic coast of America between France and England, and between Canada and Louisiana when they were both French colonies, see Parkman, A Half Century of Conflict, i. 313-314, ii. 74-77, Appendix A, 273; and Montcalm and Wolfe, i. 20-25, by the same author.
