cept on payment of a prohibitory duty, the New England
colonists, who did a thriving trade in the offspring of the union of
sugar and molasses, rum, found themselves faced by a serious problem.
Should they accept the Act and its consequential ruin of their trade or
ignore it, and by resorting to smuggling prosper as before? Without
hesitation they decided that their rights as Englishmen were assailed
by the obnoxious imposition, and they turned to smuggling with the
light heart that is conscious of a heavy purse. The contraband trade
was brisk, the contrabandists cheerful, and so long as England made no
serious attempt to put into operation laws that the genial and
business-like smugglers of the Atlantic sea-coast regarded as
preposterous nobody complained, and international relations were
cordial. But the situation was not seen with so bright an eye by the
British merchant. He witnessed with indignation the failure of the
attempt to monopolize the commerce of the colonies to his own
advantage, and he clamored for the restoration of his fat monopoly.
His clamor was unheeded while the great war {84} was running its
course. But with the end of the war and the new conditions consequent
upon the advent of a new King with a brand-new theory of kingship and
prerogative, the situation began to change.

The colonial policy of George Grenville's Administration might be
conveniently considered under three heads. The Ministry was resolved,
in the first place, to enforce Acts of Trade which smuggling had long
rendered meaningless in the American colonies. The Ministry was
resolved, in the second place, to establish a permanent garrison of
some ten thousand men in America. The Ministry was resolved, in the
third place, to make the colonists pay a third of the cost of keeping
up this garrison by a direct taxation. It was easy enough for
Grenville to formulate the three ministerial purposes, but it was not
very easy to give them any effect. The colonists resented and the
colonists resisted all three proposals. If they were technically wrong
in their resentment at the enforcement of the Acts of Trade, they were
reasonable in their reluctance to accept the proposed garrison, and
they were justified by every law of liberty and of patriotism in
resisting with all the strength at their command the proposed scheme of
taxation.

[Sidenote: 1765--James Otis and John Adams]

The English Government began its task by a rigorous att