Dripread - Book

only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual,
uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records,
for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his
measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with
manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused, for a long time after such dissolutions, to cause others
to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of
annihilation, have returned to the people at large, for their exercise,
the state remaining, in the meantime, exposed to all the dangers of
invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that
purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners, refusing
to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising
conditions of new appropriation of lands. He has obstructed the
administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws establishing
judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their
offices and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of
officers, to harass our people, and to eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the
consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to,
the civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to
our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to
their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us. For protecting
them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should
commit on the inhabitants of these States.

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world. For imposing
taxes on us without our consent.

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury.

For transporting us beyond the seas to be tried for pretended offenses.

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring
province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging
its boundaries, so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument
for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies.

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and
altering, fundamentally, the forms of our governments.

For suspending our own legislatures and declaring themselves invested
with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection,
and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and
destroyed the lives of our people.

He is, at this time, transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries,
to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun
with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the
most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized
nation.

He has constrained our fellow-citizens, taken captive on the high seas,
to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their
friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrection among us, and has endeavored to
bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages,
whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all
ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in
the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered only by
repeated injury. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act
which may define a tyrant is unfit to be ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have
warned them, from time to time, of attempts by their legislature to
extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of
the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have
appealed to their native justice and magnanimity; and we have conjured
them, by the ties of our common kindred, to disavow these usurpations,
which would inevitably interrupt our connection and correspondence.
They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.
We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our
separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in
war,

The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing / A Manual of Ready Reference