corporation of Massachusetts, having bought its land, held it as though it
were a private estate, and might exclude whom they pleased therefrom; and
ever since this plea has been set up in justification of every excess
committed by the theocracy.

Winthrop was a lawyer, and it is but justice to his reputation to presume
that he spoke as a partisan, knowing his argument to be fallacious. As a
legal proposition he must have been aware that it was unsound.

Although during the reign of Charles I. monopolies were a standing
grievance with the House of Commons, yet they had been granted and
enforced for centuries; and had Massachusetts claimed the right to exclude
strangers as interlopers in trade, she would have stood upon good
precedent. Such, however, was not her contention. The legislation against
the friends of Wheelwright was passed avowedly upon grounds of religious
difference of opinion, and a monopoly in religion was unknown.

Her commercial privileges alone were exclusive, and, provided he respected
them, a British subject had the same right to dwell in Massachusetts as in
any of the other dominions of the crown, or, indeed, in any borough which
held its land by grant, like Plymouth. To subject Englishmen to
restriction or punishment unknown to English law was as outrageous as the
same act would have been had it been perpetrated by the city of London,--
both corporations having a like power to preserve the peace by local
ordinances, and both being controlled by the law of the land as
administered by the courts. Such arguments as those advanced by Winthrop
were only solemn quibbling to cloak an indefensible policy. To banish
freemen for demanding liberty of conscience was a still more flagrant
wrong. A precisely parallel case would have been presented had the
directors of the East India Company declared the membership of a