an is the wiser.

That "the regulations for the colony trade would be few and simple if
the old navigation laws were adhered to," I utterly deny as a fact. That
they ought to be so, sounds well enough; but this proposition is of the
same nugatory nature with some of the former. The regulations for the
colony trade ought not to be more nor fewer, nor more nor less complex,
than the occasion requires. And, as that trade is in a great measure a
system of art and restriction, they can neither be few nor simple. It is
true, that the very principle may be destroyed, by multiplying to excess
the means of securing it. Never did a minister depart more from the
author's ideas of simplicity, or more embarrass the trade of America
with the multiplicity and intricacy of regulations and ordinances, than
his boasted minister of 1764. That minister seemed to be possessed with
something, hardly short of a rage, for regulation and restriction. He
had so multiplied bonds, certificates, affidavits, warrants,
sufferances, and cockets; had supported them with such severe penalties,
and extended them without the least consideration of circumstances to so
many objects, that, had they all continued in their original force,
commerce must speedily have expired under them. Some of them, the
ministry which gave them birth was obliged to destroy: with their own
hand they signed the condemnation of their own regulations; confessing
in so many words, in the preamble of their act of the 5th Geo. III.,
that some of these regulations had laid _an unnecessary restraint on the
trade and correspondence of his Majesty's American subjects_. This, in
that ministry, was a candid confession of a mistake; but every
alteration made in those regulations by their successors is to be the
effect of envy, and American misrepresentation. So much for the author's
simplicity in regulation.

I have now gone through all which I think immediately essential in the
author's idea of war, of peace, of the comparative states of England and
France, of our actual situation; in his projects of economy, of finance,
of commerce, and of constitutional improvement. There remains nothing
now to be considered, except his heavy censures upon the administration
which was formed in 1765; which is commonly known by the name of the
Marquis of Rockingham's administration, as the administration which
preceded it is by that of Mr. Grenville. These censures relate chiefly
to three heads:--1. To t