CHAPTER XV
LOSS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS CHARTER
year 1676 was doubly noteworthy in the history of New England. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, it marked the definite end of the internal menace of the Indians in the colonies, which henceforth, except for border wars, could develop their life without that lurking fear of the savage that had always haunted the dwellers in such little towns as were planted beyond the area of compact settlement. If, on the one hand, the year thus seemed to open an era of an even more unrestricted development for the peculiar polity of New England, on the other, it also marked the beginning of a more determined effort on the part of the mother-country to exert her power over the colonies, and to bring them within the administrative scope of a better organized empire. The resultant contest, the earlier phases of which have already been described, was, in the main, carried on between Massachusetts and the Crown, and continued intermittently during the quarter of a century from the Restoration of the Stuarts to the inevitable loss of the colony’s charter in 1684. In a less critical day, it was wont to be described as an unmitigated struggle between liberty-loving colonists fighting for freedom, and a king bent solely upon wreaking his tyrannical will. But the door of the past is not to be unlocked with so crude a key, and historians have learned to distrust simple formulas.
In the domestic affairs of England, the question that was more and more urgently pressing for solution was that of the location of sovereignty, and the source of power. Following the Reformation, with the development of the modern nationalities, the establishment of state-churches, and the growth of dissent, the sixteenth century had witnessed the transfer of allegiance from ecclesiastical to civil authority. The idea of law, however, as non-moral and as derived from sanctions other than divine, was but slowly coming into being. The theory of the divine right of a king to rule, although it might be used to further the purposes of a self-seeking monarch, had not been originated to serve that end. It was a natural and necessary stage in the transfer of authoritative sanction from the Papacy to the civil rulers. It was, in a word, “the assertion that civil society has an inherent right to exist apart from its ecclesiastical utility,” and that it has a sanctity of its own, which may be set off against the claims of the theocrats.
If we would understand the expression of a political idea, it is as essential to study it in relation to the previous one which it was brought forth to contradict, as it is to analyze it philosophically. From the first standpoint, the doctrine of the divine right of kings performed a useful bit of service, while, philosophically, it is neither more nor less legitimate than that of the divine right of a majority. Liberty is not, as our forefathers were too often told, a natural fact. The only natural liberty is that granted to the individual, human or brute, to sustain his life and propagate his species if he can, in the face of a universe almost overwhelmingly bent upon their destruction. Civil liberty, on the other hand, is purely social, and is a very delicate and varying adjustment of rights and duties in the succeeding stages of man’s institutional development, which has risen and fallen in the past as that equilibrium has been disturbed. The divine right of kings was a protest against the divine right of the Pope. The divine right of a majority is a protest against the divine right of kings; but democracy has yet to prove whether it is any more capable than theocracy or monarchy of the sustained moral effort necessary to maintain the balance between rights and duties, so as to preserve and enlarge the liberty of the individual.