Old Virginia and her neighbours

376 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.those ofthe Council and their Associated Burg's,without taking any [more] Notice of the Gov'r,than ifthere had been none upon the place." ^In such disputes between the legislatures chosenat home and the executive officials appointed beyondsea, Virginia, like the sister colonies in theirseveral ways, was getting the kind of political educationthat bore fruit in 1776. In Virginia theappointment of clergymen over parishes, in Marylandthe forty per poll for a church to which onlyone sixth of the people belonged, in Massachusettsthe perennial question of the governor's salary, —all these were occasions for disputescontinental about matters of internal administrationpolitics. . 1 • 1 i> I • . . 1in which tar-reaching principles were involved.Other questions, like tliat of postage justmentioned, showed that gradually but surely andsteadily a continental state of things was comingon. From the Penobscot to the Savannah therewas a continuous English world, albeit a strip sonarrow that it scarcely anywhere reached inlandmore than a hundred and fifty miles from the coast.The work of establishing postal communicationthroughout this region seemed to require somecontinental authority independent of the dozenlocal colonial legislatures. We see Parliament,with the best ofintentions, stepping in and exercisingsuch continental authority ; and we see theVirginians resisting such action, on the groundthat in laying the species oftax known as postagerates Parliament was usurping functions whichbelonged only to the colonial legislatures. Thusdid the year 1718 witness a slight presage of 1765.^ Spotswood, Official Letters, ii. 284.