he Long
Parliament took charge of the management of affairs in this country, and
although much of it went back to the King at the Restoration in 1660,
Parliament still continued to legislate for the colonies in a few
matters. Thus, for instance, Parliament by one act established the
postal service, and fixed the rates of postage; by another it regulated
the currency, and by another required the colonists to change from the
Old Style to the New Style--that is, to stop using the Julian calendar
and to count time in future by the Gregorian calendar; by another it
established a uniform law of naturalization; and from time to time it
passed acts for the purpose of regulating colonial trade.

%104. Acts of Trade and Navigation.%--The number of these acts is
very large; but their purpose was four fold:

1. They required that colonial trade should be carried on in ships built
and owned in England or in the colonies, and manned to the extent of two
thirds of the crew by English subjects.

2. They provided a long list of colonial products that should not be
sent to any foreign ports other than a port of England. Goods or
products not in the list might be sent to any other part of the world.
Thus tobacco, sugar, indigo, copper, furs, rice (if the rice was for a
port north of Cape Finisterre), must go to England; but lumber, salt
fish, and provisions might go (in English or colonial ships) to France,
or Spain, or to other foreign countries.

3. When trade began to spring up between the colonies, and the New
England merchants were competing in the colonial markets with English
merchants, an act was passed providing that if a product which went from
one colony to another was of a kind that might have been supplied from
England, it must either go to the mother country and then to the
purchasing colony, or pay an export duty at the port where it was
shipped, equal to the import duty it would have to pay in England.

4. No goods were allowed to be carried from any place in Europe to
America unless they were first landed at a port in England.[1]

[Footnote 1: Edward Eggleston's papers in the _Century Magazine_, 1884;
Scudder's _Men and Manners One Hundred Years Ago_; Lodge's _English
Colonies_.]

SUMMARY

1. The men who began the long struggle for the rights of Englishmen
lived in a state of society very different from ours, and were utterly
ignorant of most of the commonest things we use in daily life.

2. Labor was perform