An English colony is a number of persons, to whom the king grants a
charter, permitting them to settle in some distant country, and enabling
them to constitute a corporation enjoying such powers as the charter
grants, to be administered in such forms as the charter prescribes. As a
corporation, they make laws for themselves; but as a corporation,
subsisting by a grant from higher authority, to the control of that
authority they continue subject.
As men are placed at a greater distance from the supreme council of the
kingdom, they must be intrusted with ampler liberty of regulating their
conduct by their own wisdom. As they are more secluded from easy
recourse to national judicature, they must be more extensively
commissioned to pass judgment on each other.
For this reason our more important and opulent colonies see the
appearance, and feel the effect, of a regular legislature, which, in
some places, has acted so long with unquestioned authority, that it has
forgotten whence that authority was originally derived.
To their charters the colonies owe, like other corporations, their
political existence. The solemnities of legislation, the administration
of justice, the security of property, are all bestowed upon them by the
royal grant.
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