132 Chapter VI
Britain and America showed some significant differences of interpretation, and it
is these arguments that I should like to emphasize.
The Act for Better Regulating the Government of Massachusetts Bay was in
legal form an amendment to the Massachusetts charter of 1691.^34 In effect it was
a new constitution, meant to be permanent. On the one hand, it reduced the
powers of the various constituted bodies of Massachusetts. The governor’s coun-
cil, which as in other colonies acted both as an upper legislative house and as an
advisory board to the governor, was in Massachusetts, by the charter of 1691,
elected by the lower house. The lower house, or house of representatives, asserting
itself ever more forcefully after the repeal of the Stamp Act, had refused to elect
the governor’s nominees to the council, so that the council, like the lower house,
came to reflect the discontents at Boston. The Massachusetts Government Act of
1774 transformed the council by giving the governor the power to appoint its
members; and it weakened the council by taking from it the power to ratify, and
hence to veto, the governor’s appointment of sheriffs. The Act weakened the
lower house by taking from it the power to elect the council. It weakened the
towns, whose recent habit of discussing matters of “general concern” and passing
“unwarrantable resolves” it disapprovingly noted, by taking from them the right
to elect panels of jurymen, and to hold meetings unless summoned by the gov-
ernor, except for the one annual town meeting for the choice of local officers. On
the other hand, the Act strengthened the executive power, giving the governor
the right, in the King’s name, to appoint his council (as in the other royal prov-
inces), to prevent town meetings except for the annual ones, to appoint or remove
at his own discretion the sheriffs, judges, attorney general, and marshals of the
province, and to have fair juries drawn by lot from lists of eligibles assembled by
the sheriffs.
The Massachusetts Government Act, though repealed in 1778 in connection
with attempts at reconciliation, represented a continuing trend in British consti-
tutional thought on colonial government. Governor Bernard of Massachusetts,
since before the Stamp Act, had stressed the need of strengthening the office of
governor, and of creating a more independent council on the analogy of the Lords
in England. America, Bernard thought, was not yet ready for hereditary nobility
(an institution which to him signified an advanced state of civilization), but
meanwhile “a Nobility appointed by the King, for Life, and made independent,
would probably give strength and stability to the American government, as ef-
fectually as an hereditary Nobility does to that of Great Britain.” Years later a
correspondent of Edmund Burke, in a plan of 1782 to make peace with America
while keeping it in the empire, a plan intended to be liberal since it would even
abolish the Navigation System, set up a “model charter” for each of the colonies—
a model in which government should be in three parts: first, a governor appointed
from Britain; second, an upper house of a hundred persons having real estate
worth over £600 a year, sitting and voting jure possessionum, or elected by persons
with the same qualifications, if there were more than a hundred in the province;
third, a lower house elected by town freemen and county freeholders. In this plan
34 14 Geo. III, c. 45.