in, which might fairly be taken in
place of any direct supplies, and which while it asserted the
sovereignty of the mother country, left their local freedom untouched.
The harshness of such a monopoly had indeed been somewhat mitigated by
a system of contraband trade which had grown up between American ports
and the adjacent Spanish islands, a trade so necessary for the Colonies,
and in the end so beneficial to British commerce itself, that statesmen
like Walpole had winked at its developement. The pedantry of Grenville
however saw in it only an infringement of British monopoly; and one of
his first steps was to suppress this contraband trade by a rigid
enforcement of the navigation laws. Harsh and unwise as these measures
seemed, the colonists owned their legality; and their resentment only
showed itself in a pledge to use no British manufactures till the
restrictions were relaxed. But such a stroke was a mere measure of
retaliation, whose pressure was pretty sure in the end to effect its
aim; and even in their moment of irritation the colonists uttered no
protest against the monopoly of their trade. Their position indeed was
strictly conservative; what they claimed was a continuance of the
existing connexion; and had their claim been admitted, they would
probably have drifted quietly into such a relation to the crown as that
of our actual colonies in Canada and Australasia.

[Sidenote: The Stamp Act passed.]

What the issue of such a policy might have been as America grew to a
population and wealth beyond those of the mother country, it is hard to
guess. But no such policy was to be tried. The next scheme of the
Minister--his proposal to introduce internal taxation within the bounds
of the Colonies themselves by reviving the project of an excise or stamp
duty, which Walpole's good sense had rejected--was of another order from
his schemes for suppressing the contraband traffic. Unlike the system of
the Navigation Acts, it was a gigantic change in the whole actual
relations of England and its colonies. They met it therefore in another
spirit. Taxation and representation, they asserted, went hand in hand.
America had no representatives in the British Parliament. The
representatives of the colonists met in their own colonial assemblies,
and these were willing to grant supplies of a larger amount than a
stamp-tax would produce. Massachusetts--first as ever in her
protest--marked accurately the position she took. "Prohibit