University of Virginia Library

2188. DEPORTATION ACT, Denounced.—

By the act for the suppression of
riots and tumults in the town of Boston (14.
G. 3), passed also in the last session of Parliament,
a murder committed there is, if the
Governor pleases, to be tried in the court of
King's Bench, in the island of Great Britain,
by a jury of Middlesex. The witnesses, too,
on receipt of such a sum as the Governor
shall think it reasonable for them to expend,
are to enter into recognizance to appear at

the trial. This is, in other words, taxing them
to the amount of their recognizance; and
that amount may be whatever a Governor
pleases. For who does his Majesty think can
be prevailed on to cross the Atlantic for the
sole purpose of bearing evidence to a fact?
His expenses are to be borne, indeed, as they
shall be estimated by a Governor; but who are
to feed the wife and children whom he leaves
behind, and who have had no other subsistence
but his daily labor? Those epidemical
disorders, too, so terrible in a foreign climate,
is the cure of them to be estimated among the
articles of expense, and their danger to be
warded off by the almighty power of a Parliament?
And the wretched criminal, if he
happen to have offended on the American
side, stripped of his privilege of trial by peers
of his vicinage, removed from the place
where alone full evidence could be obtained,
without money, without counsel, without
friends, without exculpatory proof, is tried
before judges predetermined to condemn.
The cowards who would suffer a countryman
to be torn from the bowels of their society, in
order to be thus offered a sacrifice to Parliamentary
tyranny, would merit that everlasting
infamy now fixed on the authors of the act!—
Rights of British America. Washington ed. i, 133. Ford ed., i, 438.
(1774)