se communities consented to
have their trade regulated and restricted, to their own detriment and
the advantage of English merchants. They had protested, but they had
ended by yielding. Now Adam Smith says that to prohibit a great people
from making all they can of every part of their own produce, or from
employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most
advantageous for themselves, is a manifest violation of the most
sacred rights of mankind. There was a latent sense of injury which
broke out when, in addition to interference with the freedom of trade,
England exercised the right of taxation. An American lately wrote:
"The real foundation of the discontent which led to the Revolution was
the effort of Great Britain, beginning in 1750, to prevent diversity
of occupation, to attack the growth of manufactures and the mechanic
arts, and the final cause before the attempt to tax without
representation was the effort to enforce the navigation laws." When
England argued that the hardship of regulation might be greater than
the hardship of taxation, and that those who submitted to the one
submitted, in principle, to the other, Franklin replied that the
Americans had not taken that view, but that, when it was put before
them, they would be willing to reject both one and the other. He knew,
however, that the ground taken up by his countrymen was too narrow. He
wrote to the French economist, Morellet: "Nothing can be better
expressed than your sentiments are on this point, where you prefer
liberty of trading, cultivating, manufacturing, etc., even to civil
liberty, this being affected but rarely, the other every hour."

These early authors of American independence were generally
enthusiasts for the British Constitution, and preceded Burke in the
tendency to canonise it, and to magnify it as an ideal exemplar for
nations. John Adams said, in 1766: "Here lies the difference between
the British Constitution and other forms of government, namely, that
liberty is its end, its use, its designation, drift and scope, as much
as grinding corn is the use of a mill." Another celebrated Bostonian
identified the Constitution with the law of Nature, as Montesquieu
called the Civil Law, written Reason. He said: "It is the glory of the
British prince and the happiness of all his subjects, that their
constitution hath its foundation in the immutable laws of Nature; and
as the supreme legislative, as well as the supreme executive,