t half a dozen of these in England,) prevailed totally to forbid,
by an Act of Parliament, the erecting of slitting-mills or
steel-furnaces in America, that the Americans may be obliged to take all
their nails for their buildings, and steel for their tools, from these
artificers," etc.

"It is an idle argument in the Americans," said Governor Pownall, "when
they talk of setting up manufactures _for trade_; but it would be
equally injudicious in Government here to force any measure that may
render the manufacturing for _home consumption_ an object of prudence,
or even of pique, in the Americans."

The maternal Government pressed this matter a little too fast and too
far. The Colonists became _piqued_ at last, and resolved, in 1764, not
to purchase English stuffs for clothing, but to use articles of domestic
manufacture as far as possible. Boston, always a ringleader in these
mischiefs, diminished her consumption of British merchandise ten
thousand pounds and more in this one year. The Harvard-College youth
rivalled the neighboring town in their patriotic self-sacrifice, and the
whole graduating class of 1770, with the names of Hutchinson,
Saltonstall, and Winthrop at the head of the list, appeared at
Commencement in black cloth of home-manufacture. This act of defiance
only illustrates more forcibly the almost complete dependence of
Colonial industry at the time of its occurrence, the effect of a policy
which looked upon the Colonies with no reference to any other
consideration than the immediate profit to be derived from them.

In spite, however, of the hard measures employed by England to cripple
the development of the Colonies in every direction, except such as might
be profitable to herself, it was a very difficult matter to root out
their affection for the mother-country. Pownall, who was in this country
from 1753 to 1761, successively Governor of Massachusetts,
Lieutenant-Governor of New Jersey, and Governor of South Carolina, gives
us the most ample testimony on this point. His words are so strong that
none can fail to be impressed with the picture he draws of a people who
ten years later were in open revolt against the home authorities.

"The duty of a colony is affection for the mother-country: here I may
affirm, that, in whatever form and temper this affection can lie in the
human breast, in that form, by the deepest and most permanent
impression, it ever did lie in the breast of the American people. They
h