15s Benjamin Franklin [1773 
mous expense, and a final judgment in favor of the 
oppressor. This will have an admirable effect every 
way. The trouble of future complaints will be pre- 
vented, and governors and judges will be encouraged 
to further acts of oppression and injustice; and 
thence the people may become more disaffected, and 
at length desperate. 
7. When such governors have crammed their cof- 
fers and made themselves so odious to the people 
that they can no longer remain among them with 
safety to their persons, recall and reward them with 
pensions. You may make them baronets too, if that 
respectable order should not think fit to resent it. 
All will contribute to encourage new governors in 
the same practice, and make the supreme govern- 
ment detestable. 
8. If when you are engaged in war, your colonies 
should vie in liberal aids of men and money against 
the common enemy, upon your simple requisition, 
and) give far beyond their abilities, reflect that a 
penny taken from them by your power is more honor- 
able to you than a pound presented by their benevo- 
lence; despise therefore their voluntary gramts, and 
resolve to harass them with novel taxes. They will 
probably complain to your Parliament, that they are 
taxed by a body in which they have no representative 
and that this is contrary to common right. They will 
petition for redress. Let the Parliament flout their 
claims, reject their petitions, refuse even to suffer the 
reading of them, and treat the petitioners with 
the utmost contempt. Nothing can have a better 
effect in producing the alienation proposed; for, 
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