The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved
The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved
By: James Otis, 1764
Building Context: Boston lawyer James Otis was one of the foremost colonial American critics of British policies during the leadup to the Revolutionary War. In this pamphlet, he argued that taxation without representation was unjust and a violation of the rights of the colonists.
Source: Link to Full Source
Text |
Notes |
| The first principle and great end of government being to provide for the best good of all the people, this can be done only by a supreme legislative and executive ultimately in the people, or whole community, where God has placed it; but the inconveniencies, not to say impossibility, attending the consultations and operations of a large body of people have made it necessary to transfer the power of the whole to a few: This necessity gave rise to deputation, proxy, or a right of representation… | |
| Every British subject born on the continent of America, or in any other of the British dominions, is by the law of God and nature, by the common law, and by act of Parliament (exclusive of all charters from the crown), entitled to all the natural, essential, inherent, and inseparable rights of our fellow subjects in Great Britain. Among those rights are the following, which it is humbly conceived no man or body of men, not excepting the Parliament—justly, equitably, and consistently with their own rights and the constitution—can take away.
|
|
| These are their bounds, which by God and nature are fixed, hitherto have they a right to come, and no further.
1. To govern by stated laws. 2. Those laws should have no other end ultimately, but the good of the people. 3. Taxes are not to be laid on the people, but by their consent in person, or by deputation. 4. Their whole power is not transferable.
|
|
| That the colonists, black and white, born here, are freeborn British subjects, and entitled to all the essential civil rights of such, is a truth not only manifest from the provincial charters, from the principles of the common law, and acts of Parliament; but from the British constitution, which was reestablished at the revolution,[4] with a professed design to lecture the liberties of all the subjects to all generations… | |
| I can see no reason to doubt, but that the imposition of taxes, whether on trade, or on land, or houses, or ships, on real or personal, fixed or floating property, in the colonies, is absolutely irreconcilable with the rights of the colonists, as British subjects, and as men. I say men, for in a state of nature, no man can take my property from me, without my consent: If he does, he deprives me of my liberty, and makes me a slave. If such a proceeding is a breach of the law of nature, no law of society can make it just. The very act of taxing, exercised over those who are not represented, appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most essential rights, as freemen; and if continued, seems to be in effect an entire disfranchisement of every civil right… |
Primary Source by James Otis (1764)