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"It was for the most part declaratory of the principal grounds of the fundamental laws of England, and for the residue it is additional to supply some defects of the common law.
The legislature plainly had in view the Act of Recognition of the first of Queen Elizabeth, chap. 3rd, and of that of James the First, chap. 1st, both acts strongly declaratory of the inheritable nature of the crown; and in many parts they follow, with a nearly literal precision, the words, and even the form of thanksgiving which is found in these old declaratory statutes.
It was the principle, of which the tax made but a part, and the quantity still less, that formed the ground on which America opposed. The tax on tea, which is the tax here alluded to, was neither more or less than an experiment to establish the practice of a declaratory law upon; modelled into the more fashionable phrase of the universal supremacy of Parliament.
Again, there are two ways of securing the right of suffrage under the Constitution as it is, one by a declaratory act of Congress instructing the officers of election to receive the votes of women; the other by bringing suits before the courts, as women already have done, in order to secure a judicial decision on the broad interpretation of the Constitution that all persons are citizens, and all citizens voters.
This also made it hard to say whether Lord Aberdeen's Act were enactory or declaratory, a predicament, however, which equally affects all statutes for removing doubts. The 'call, then, we consider as no longer recognised by law. But did Lord Aberdeen by that change establish the right of the patron as an unconditional right? By no means. He made it strictly a conditional right.
This blockade was declaratory only, and the inadequacy of the force to maintain it was so manifest that this allegation was varied to a charge of trade in contraband of war.
The first public measure of Congress was a resolution declaratory of their feelings with regard to the recent acts of Parliament, violating the rights of the people of Massachusetts, and of their determination to combine in resisting any force that might attempt to carry those acts into execution.
If then, the stamp act was an usurpation of the Americans' most precious and sacred rights, the declaratory Act left them no rights at all; and contained the full grown seeds of the most despotic government ever exercised in the world.
They heeded little that simultaneously with the repeal a resolve had been carried through declaratory of the principle on which the Stamp Act had been based. The assertion of the right gave them at this moment "very little concern," since they hugged a triumphant belief that no further attempt would be made to carry that right into practice.
To yield under the circumstances may have been wise or not; but Government had not yielded on any ground of right, but had on the contrary most expressly affirmed, in the Declaratory Act, that "the King's Majesty, by and with the advice of the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons of Great Britain, in Parliament assembled, had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make such laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the Crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever."
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