principal officers of the revenue. In New Jersey, the collector was thwarted by the people who formed the juries, when prosecutions were commenced against smugglers; while the quarrels between the officers of that Colony and of New York, as to the right of entering and clearing vessels, added to the disturbances, and the seizures and condemnations which followed, produced great commotion.

In New England, the royal collector, surveyor, and searcher, as Randolph was called, encountered obstacles that would have subdued the spirit of any other man. Determined upon success, he made eight voyages to America during the nine years which connect his name with our subject. His instructions were dated from the "Custom-house, London, July 9, 1678," and affixed to them are the signatures of Ed. Dering, Ch. Cheyne, and G. Downing. These instructions were long and tediously minute, being arranged under nineteen distinct heads. They were evidently framed by one who was thoroughly acquainted with the course of Colonial trade, and perhaps by Downing himself. The of fences for which ships and cargoes might be seized were very numerous. He was furnished with a number of documents, copies of which were probably given to all officers engaged in the same business with himself. Among these papers were the "Act of Tonnage and Poundage," the "Act of Navigation," that for "preventing Fraud," for "Encouragement of Trade," for "The better regulating the Plantation Trade," and for "The better securing the Plantation Trade. He was directed, moreover, to settle his "vsual residence in the port of Boston, in Massachusetts Colonye, and to appoint one deputy at least in the "Colonyes of Plymouth, Connecticut, Rhode Island, the Province of Mayne, and New Hampshire."

Such was the mission of the first royal officer of the customs who appeared among the Roundheads of Boston. He was a doomed man before his arrival. The vessels which were seized by him and his deputies were rescued; the subordinates were fined by the Colonial courts for their officious zeal; and the principal, after enduring every indignity, was at last imprisoned. In a letter to Lord Clarendon, written from Boston, in 1682, he says, "I humbly beseech your Lordship, that I may have consideration for all my losses and money laid out in prosecuting seizures here." The same

year, he wrote to the Bishop of London: "I have a great fammyly to mayntayne, have had great losses and expences about his Majesties service here." To a Mr. Povey, in 1687, he says: "I am at 50 £ a year charge to keep an able clerke, and cannot get any fees settled sufficient to pay that charge." In a letter dated from the "Gaol in Boston," to the governor of Barbadoes, he thus writes: "The countrey is poor, the exact execution of the acts of trade hath much impoverished them all the blame lyes upon me, who first attacked and then overthrew their charter, and was made the officer to continue their Egyptian servitude, by my office of collector." Again, and from his dungeon, he implored Cooke, his old enemy, to take from his apartment a wounded fellow-prisoner, whose sores had become insupportably offensive. The commercial orders of Sir Edmund Andros, who was sent to govern New England after the charter of Massachusetts was vacated, were as rigid as those of Randolph. He was deposed, and then the attempt rigidly to enforce these orders ended.

Such was the result of the first effort to fasten the Navigation Act and the Laws of Trade upon the American Colonies. It was hoped that the second attempt, made nearly a century afterwards, would be more successful; but it terminated more disastrously than the former one. Separation from the mother country would have followed the one as certainly as it did the other, if there had been the same strength and concert, the same deeply seated irritation, caused by often repeated and long continued wrongs, and the same aid from the state of English and European politics. There never was a period, early or late, when the maritime Colonies would have submitted willingly to the requirements of these statutes, or when their influence would not have caused opposition to them to be made in the other Colonies. Whoever carefully traces the course of events for the fifteen years immediately following 1676 will discover a most striking resemblance to those which occurred between 1761 and the commencement of hostilities. The periods of the introduction and the expulsion of royal collectors of the customs are alike memorable epochs in our annals.

After narrating at some length the events which preceded the war between England and Spain, in 1739, Chalmers says, that the object of the war was "partly to avenge the

392 Chalmers's History of the American Colonies. [April,

supposed depredations of Spain, but more to protect Georgia from invasion, and to establish for Carolina a barrier." * Reverse the statement, and we come much nearer to the truth; a writer who so frequently and severely condemns the illicit traffic of the Northern Colonies should have given the causes and objects of this war more accurately. The fact was, British subjects carried on an extensive contraband trade with the Spanish possessions, which Spain earnestly insisted upon checking or wholly suppressing. In the effort, it was alleged, she interrupted not only the unlawful commerce of British merchants, but that also which was legal; and from this dispute principally, if not entirely, originated the appeal to arms. The desire to protect Georgia and to establish for Carolina a barrier was hardly among the leading pretexts for hostile measures, and had little or no share in really producing them. If British smugglers had not been molested, peace would have been preserved. The war was alike unnecessary and dishonorable.

We here conclude our hasty comments upon the work of this zealous friend and supporter of the prerogative, with commending it to our readers as well worthy of perusal, and even of diligent study. We cannot learn too much of American history; and the publication of works relating to it, which contain original and valuable materials, ought to be encouraged, though, as in the present case, they also contain sentiments that are illiberal and unjust. It is only by reading both sides of the controversy which severed us from the parent stock, that the real issues can be certainly and fully ascertained. As this history ends with the reign of George the Second, the question as to the origin and effects of the agreements of non-importation, of the committees of correspondence, and of the Continental Congress, which were the three great engines that were used to tear up the framework of the Colonial system in the American Colonies, does not fairly come before us for consideration. It was a great disappointment to us, to find that our loyalist writer gives no account of the transactions of the fifteen years which immediately preceded the war. A digest prepared by him of the correspondence of the royal governors of the several Colonies with the ministry during that time would have had great

* Vol. II., p. 185.

interest. But as the writings of the losers in the strife continue to multiply, we may hope that something will appear at a future time to supply the deficiency. Would that each of the representatives of the crown, like Hutchinson, had written out his opinion of the men and measures that he resisted! Cooke of Rhode Island, and Trumbull of Connecticut, were sound Whigs; but with what avidity would the curious inquirer into the things of the past read narratives of the difficulties and embarrassments of Wentworth, Tryon, and Franklin, of Penn, Eden, Dunmore, and Martin, written out by their own hands!

ART. V.

Theory of Morals: an Inquiry concerning the Law of Moral Distinctions and the Variations and Contradictions of Ethical Codes. BY RICHARD HILDRETH. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown. 1844. 12mo. pp. 272.

"SEVERAL of my characters," says the author of "Ten Thousand a Year," " may be looked on as reptiles of a low order in the scale of being, whose simple structures almost one dash of the knife would suffice to lay thoroughly open. Gammon, however, I look upon as of a much higher order, possessing a far more complicated structure, adapted to the discharge of superior functions; and who, consequently, requireth a more careful dissection." The distinction here indicated applies emphatically to bad books. Some need but

a single dash of the knife, and are not worth even that; but combine weakness and wickedness in such happy proportions, that the reviewer may safely let them crawl unmolested to oblivion. The book before us is of a higher order; it has many of the properties of a good book; it is grave, decent, dignified, in its tone and manner; it purports to be a truly philosophical work; but its reasoning is all vitiated by the assumption of false premises, and its sober, didactic style is made the vehicle for conveying the most licentious sentiments in morals and theology.

Yet in some quarters this book will do good. The reductio ad absurdum is a mode of reasoning no less applicable

to moral than to mathematical science; and on many moral subjects it furnishes arguments of peculiar cogency. For there are axioms in ethics no less than in geometry; and there is no surer way of detecting latent fallacy in premises plausibly assumed, than to follow out these premises to legitimate conclusions at variance with established axioms in moral science. Happy is it for the public, when the advocate of a false theory of morals does this work himself, and thus comprises within the covers of the same book the bane and the antidote. Such has been the fair, open, honest course pursued by Mr. Hildreth. He has fearlessly carried out his principles, has exhibited their application to the details of domestic and social life, and has engrafted upon them a code of practical morals, which, were he to embody it in actual conduct, would soon confer upon him the crown of martyrdom at the hands of the hangman. In this way he has rendered the public a very timely service. There are many beardless youths and lisping maidens, and some men and women old enough to know better, who flout at authority in morals, parade their own intuitions and instincts as the sole criterion of right, and vaguely intimate, that laws, which generations of the wise and good have revered as bearing the broad seal of heaven, have become obsolete, or at least must undergo the revision of the nineteenth century, and pass henceforth for what each individual may deem them worth. Our author has most lucidly demonstrated, that those benevolent impulses, which, as he says, alone constitute virtue, permit every unmarried woman to become a prostitute, and forbid not the disappointed man to die by his own hand; nor will it be easy for the pure-minded and virtuous disciples of the new philosophy to deny these revolting conclusions, unless by admitting the incompetency of man, without divine aid, to discover and mark out for himself the path of virtue. Mr. Hildreth terms his system a "forensic " system of ethics, and with great propriety; for its general adoption would furnish inexhaustible occupation for the courts of justice. But it is time that we presented an analysis of the book.

Mr. Hildreth commences by setting aside as baseless the leading ethical systems of ancient and modern times, and denying the existence of any intrinsic difference, any essential, immutable distinction, between right and wrong. Actions, as he says, are the only subjects of moral cognizance.