If you pay ready money for your laws, and those laws are not liked by the proprietaries, you are charged with bribery and corruption: if you wait a while before you pay, you are accused of detaining the governor's customary right, and dunned as a negligent or dishonest debtor, that refuses to discharge a just debt!
Franklin critiques the contradictory expectations placed on the assembly regarding payments for laws.
Share
More from Benjamin Franklin
If the English would advance one step further, or cover themselves where they are, it must be at once, by one large step over the mountains, with a numerous and military colony.
Our legal method of compulsion is by imprisonment: the Indians cannot and will not imprison one another; and if we attempt to imprison them, I apprehend it would be generally disliked by the nations, and occasion breaches.
And as there are already in the old colonies many thousands of families that are ready to swarm, wanting more land; the richness and natural advantage of the Ohio country would draw most of them thither, were there but a tolerable prospect…
I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire.
Other voices in this conversation
