ut any regard to the principles involved in our struggle, let us
look back and see whether it was any different in 1763, or in 1663. If
her policy has been uniform at these three periods, it is time for us to
have learned our lesson.

Two hundred years ago, in the year 1663, an Act of Parliament was passed
to monopolize the Colonial trade for England, for the sake, as its
preamble stated, "of keeping them [the Colonies] in a firmer dependence
upon it, and rendering them yet more beneficial and advantageous unto
it, in the further employment and increase of English shipping and
seamen, vent of English woollens and other manufactures and
commodities," etc. This act had, of course, the effect of increasing and
perpetuating the naturally close dependence of the Colonies on the
mother-country for most of the products of industry. But in an infant
community the effect of such restrictions would be little felt, and it
required another century before an extension of the same system was
publicly recognized as being a robbery of the child by the parent. To
show how far the system was carried, and what was the effect on the
public mind of a course founded in pure, and, as it proved,
short-sighted selfishness, it will be necessary to recall some of the
details which help to account for the sudden change at last in the
disposition of the Colonists.

One hundred years ago, on the tenth of February, 1763, a treaty of peace
between England and France, as the leading powers, was signed at Paris.
This was no sooner arranged than the Ministry began that system of
Colonial taxation which the Massachusetts House of Representatives
denounced as tending to give the Crown and Ministers "an absolute and
uncontrollable power of raising money upon the people, which by the wise
Constitution of Great Britain is and can be only lodged with safety in
the legislature." Part and parcel of this system was that comprehensive
scheme of tyranny by means of which England attempted to secure the
perpetual industrial dependence of the American Colonies, the principle
of which we have already seen openly avowed in the Act of Parliament of
1663, a hundred years earlier.

It was her fixed policy, as is well known, to keep her skilled artisans
at home, and to discourage as far as possible all manufactures in the
Colonies. By different statutes, passed in successive reigns, persons
enticing artificers into foreign countries incur the penalty of five
hundred pou