Creating the Declaration of Independence

Transcription: Page 2

he has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good:

he has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate & pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained;

and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected utterly to attend to them.

he has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them, & formidable to tyrants only:

he has called together legislative bodies in places unusual, uncomfortable & 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 & continually,] for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

he has dissolved, he has refused for a long space of time time after such dissolutions [Mr. Adams] 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, & 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 migrations hither; & raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands:

he has [suffered] the adminstration of justice [totally to cease in some of these colonies states], refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers:

he has made [our] judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount & payment [Dr. Franklin] of their salaries:

he has erected a multitude of new offices [by a self-assumed power,] & sent hither swarms of new officers to harass our people & eat out their substance:

he has kept among us in times of peace without our consent standing armies, [& ships of war without our the consent of our legislature:]

he has affected to render the military independent of, & superior to the civil power:

he has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended acts of legislation, for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us;
for protecting them, by a 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 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 it's boundaries so as to render it at once an example & fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies states;

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