This easy tenure was expressly
provided for the lands of the new country; and it is a happy circumstance
that America has been little affected even by the softened bonds thus
early imposed upon her.
But how shall these colonial subjects be governed? and from whom shall
they derive their laws? These were questions to which the vanity and the
arbitrary principles of the King soon found a reply. Two councils were to
be provided, one for each colony, and each consisting of thirteen
members. They were to govern the colonists according to such laws,
ordinances, and instructions as should afterward be given by the King
himself, under his sign manual and the privy seal of the realm of
England; and the members of the council were to be "ordained, made, and
removed from time to time," as the same instructions should direct. In
addition to these provincial bodies a council of thirteen, likewise
appointed by the King, was to be created in England, to which was
committed the general duty of superintending the affairs of both
colonies.
And to prove the pious designs of a monarch whose religion neither
checked the bigotry of his spirit nor the profaneness of his language it
was recited in the preamble of this charter that one leading object of
the enterprise was the propagation of Christianity among "such people as
yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and
worship of God, and might in time be brought to human civility and to a
settled and quiet government.
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