CHAPTER VII.
THE SECOND ROYAL CHARTER; HOW OBTAINED--MASSACHUSETTS NEARLY SIXTY YEARS UNDER THE SECOND CHARTER, FROM 1691 TO 1748; TO THE CLOSE OF THE FIRST WAR BETWEEN ENGLAND AND FRANCE, AND THE PEACE OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE.
I have traced the characteristics of the Government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony during fifty-four years under its first Charter, in its relations to the Crown, to the citizens of its own jurisdiction, to the inhabitants of the neighbouring colonies, and to the Indians; its denial of Royal authority; its renunciation of one form of worship and Church polity, and adoption of another; its denial of toleration to any but Congregationalists, and of the elective franchise, to four-fifths of the male population; its taxing without representation; its denial of the right of appeal to the King, or any right on the part of the King or Parliament to receive appeals, or to the exercise of any supervision or means of seeing that "the laws of England were not contravened" by their acts of legislation or government, while they were sheltered by the British navy from the actual and threatened invasion of the Dutch, Spaniards, and French, not to say the Indians, always prompted and backed by the French, thus claiming all the attributes of an independent Government, but resting under the aegis of an Imperial protection to maintain an independence which they asserted, but could not themselves maintain against foreign enemies.
I will now proceed to note the subsequent corresponding facts of their history during seventy years under the second Royal Charter.
They averred, and no doubt brought themselves to believe, that with their first Charter, as interpreted by themselves, was bound up their _political life_, or what they alleged to be dearer to them than life, and that in its loss was involved their _political death_; but they made no martial effort to prolong that life, or to save themselves from that premature death.
Mr.Palfrey assigns various reasons for this non-resistance to the cancelling of their Charter; but he omits or obscurely alludes to the real ones.
Dr.Palfrey says: "The reader asks how it could be that the decree by which Massachusetts fell should fail to provoke resistance.

He inquires whether nothing was left of the spirit which, when the colony was much poorer, had often defied and baffled the designs of the father of the reigning King.

He must remember how times were changed.

There was no longer a great patriot party in England, to which the colonists might look for sympathy and help, and which it had even hoped might reinforce them by a new emigration.

There was no longer even a Presbyterian party which, little as it had loved them, a sense of common insecurity and common interest might enlist in their behalf....