Original text - English - Back in the seventeenth century the Americans’...

Back in the seventeenth century the Americans’ ancestors in each colony “either before, or soon after their emigration, entered into particular compacts with the Kings of England,” involving their several forms of government which were, “by charters, royal proclamations, and the laws and regulations in each colony…made by the mutual consent of the King and the People.” These charters were not franchises or grants from the Crown that could be unilaterally recalled of forfeited, as the Tories claimed: “Their running in the stile of a grant is mere matter of form and not of substance.”