PART III.

THE ERA OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN AMERICA.

66

les révolutions que forme la liberté ne sont qu'une confir

mation de la liberté."

Esprit des Lois, liv. xix, chap. xxvii.

IT

CHAPTER IX.

The Wooden Horse.

T is unnecessary to enumerate all the different Acts of Parliament-though each served the purpose of irritating the general temper-by which "regulation" gradually encroached on rights that nature, time, and charters had all united in making sacred. It is sufficient to say, that the spirit of trade, presuming on its manifest supremacy, which, so far at least as Massachusetts is concerned, had received legislative acknowledgment in the adoption of the Navigation Act, fully carried out the law of its being, and that, invariably proceeding from much to more, it made one trespass the pretext for another, until restriction became onerous, compensation was fast diminishing, and exaction began. to wear a threatening look. The system of restriction, in fact, had become so searching, so grasping, and so comprehensive, that, had it been rigidly enforced, the colonies could scarcely have traded at all. The Acts of Trade had followed each other thick and fast. Tobacco, rum, sugar, molasses; wool, fish, timber, and iron, all, in the course of time, became the subject of English aggrandizement at colonial cost, until, according to Mr. Otis, not even a fleece of wool could be conveyed in a canoe across a river or a brook, without the risk of seizure and forfeiture. The statute book bristled with legislation shoring up the Navigation Acts and the Acts of Trade. As the former aimed at the control of commerce on the high seas, so these, their progeny, sought the control of provincial labor and internal trade.'

1Exporting wool, contrary to the regulations, involved forfeiture of ship 12 George II., c. 21, s. II. No wool, or woollen manufacture of the pla was to be exported, 10 and 11 Wm. III., c. 10, s. 19. Steel furn ting mills etc. were not to be erected in the plantations, 23 Ge

The result of all this was to excite alarm, and, from making the temper of the colonies sensitive to encroachment, to render it irritable. However, as the political rights of the colonies were untouched, dissatisfaction was limited to commercial exaction; though nothing can be plainer than that irritation respecting one thing, was apt, on the slightest provocation, to extend to another. Still, no one had the intention of doing more than, by protesting and by showing a bold front, to maintain chartered rights. It was when the anxiety of the colonies in reference to their commercial future was fully aroused, that there occurred what may well be called the forerunner of the Revolution. From the first it was no more than of the bigness of a man's hand, and it speedily resolved itself into thin air before the chilling blast of Otis' logic. But, nevertheless, it too plainly betrayed the drift of government, and the apprehension it left behind grew into actual alarm when more portentous clouds, one after another, rose above the horizon. It served the unfortunate purpose of raising the appearance of antagonism between the government and colonists, it placed them in the attitude of confronting each other, and set the latter to watching for encroachments, and pondering on the means of opposing them :—yet no such thing as actual conflict was so much as dreamed of by either. This harbinger of strife was the attempt of the government to enforce the Acts of Trade by Writs of Assistance.

In his work, previously alluded to, Ashley had made the following remarks: "The laws now in being for the regulation of the plantation trade, namely the 14th of Charles II., chap. 2, sec. 2, 3, 9, 10; 7 and 8 William III., chap. 22, sec. 5, 6; 6 George II., chap. 13,' are very well calculated, and were they put in execution as they ought to be, would, in a great measure, put an end to the mischiefs here complained of. If the several officers of the customs would see that all entries of sugar, rum, and molasses were made conformable to the directions of those laws; and let every entry of such goods distinguish expressly, what are of British growth and produce, and what are of foreign growth and produce; and let the whole cargo of sugar, penneles, rum, 29, s. 9. Hats were not to be exported from one colony to another, 5 George II, c. 22; nor were hatters to have more than two apprentices, 5 Geo. II., C. 22, s. 7. And furs were to be taken to Great Britain, 8 Geo. I., c. 15, s. 24. 'See Appendix F.