to be there adjudicated, there was probably also a dawning apprehension that 
judicial proceedings were the least intolerable of the several extant methods 
of superintendence. In the bill of particulars embodied in the Declaration of 
Independence it was against the incidents of administrative scrutiny of legislation 
that the colonists fulminated, and one may infer that despite recalcitrance 
to appellate review, there was no feeling of grievance. After all, as many 
winners as losers returned to the provinces from the forensic battles in the 
Cockpit. 
Some indication of the state of enlightened colonial opinion respecting 
judicial review shortly before the Revolution may be found in the report of 
an interview between William Samuel Johnson and the Earl of Hillsborough 
at the time when the latter took over the office of Secretary of State for the 
American Department. Hillsborough undertook to persuade Johnson, then 
agent for Connecticut, that the legislative acts of that colony should be subject 
to review by the King in Council. Although seeming to admit that under the 
charter royal approbation could not be made a requisite to the validity of 
Connecticut acts, Hillsborough insisted that acts should be regularly transmitted 
for disapprobation if found within the saving of the charter "repugnant 
to the laws of England." Johnson retorted that the colony did not apprehend 
that the royal ministers or the Privy Council could determine whether 
any particular act was within that proviso or not; that this question could 
only be decided by a court of law having jurisdiction of the subject matter 
of the law in question. If the General Assembly should make a law repugnant 
to a statute of Great Britain (not in the sense of "diverse from," but flatly and 
in terms contradictory to it) such law by the charter clause might be void, 
yet a conciliar declaration thereof would be of no effect, but be as void as the 
law itself. Voidness depended upon the restraining clause in the charter, not 
upon any authority of decision reserved to the crown. The determination, 
being judicial, could take place in the Connecticut courts; if any interposition 
took place in England, it must be in a judicial, not a ministerial, manner. 
Johnson reported to Governor Pitkin that in England the judicial power of 
the Privy Council was regarded to rest upon custom rather than prerogative 
(which Johnson considered to be the true basis), but these issues were not 
discussed, for the agent did not think it advisable to introduce so delicate a 
subject. 637 
Coming from a lawyer raised in a milieu of never dormant recalcitrance, 
the concession that in any event judicial determinations of voidness at the 
hands of the Privy Council were proper possesses considerable significance. 
637 Trumbull Papers, 256-61. For the origin Basye, The Board of Trade, 1748-1782, 168- 
of this office see Spector, The American Depart- 73. 
ment of the British Government (1940), c. 1;