er source of irritation, we must devote a few words to the laws by
which that government had for a long time undertaken to regulate the
commerce of the American colonies.

[Sidenote: What European colonies were supposed to be founded for.]

When European nations began to plant colonies in America, they treated
them in accordance with a theory which prevailed until it was upset by
the American Revolution. According to this ignorant and barbarous
theory, a colony was a community which existed only for the purpose of
enriching the country which had founded it. At the outset, the Spanish
notion of a colony was that of a military station, which might plunder
the heathen for the benefit of the hungry treasury of the Most Catholic
monarch. But this theory was short-lived, like the enjoyment of the
plunder which it succeeded in extorting. According to the principles and
practice of France and England--and of Spain also, after the first
romantic fury of buccaneering had spent itself--the great object in
founding a colony, besides increasing one's general importance in the
world and the area of one's dominions on the map, was to create a
dependent community for the purpose of trading with it. People's ideas
about trade were very absurd. It was not understood that when two
parties trade with each other freely, both must be gainers, or else one
would soon stop trading. It was supposed that in trade, just as in
gambling or betting, what the one party gains the other loses.
Accordingly laws were made to regulate trade so that, as far as
possible, all the loss might fall upon the colonies and all the gain
accrue to the mother-country. In order to attain this object, the
colonies were required to confine their trade entirely to England. No
American colony could send its tobacco or its rice or its indigo to
France or to Holland, or to any other country than England; nor could it
buy a yard of French silk or a pound of Chinese tea except from English
merchants. In this way English merchants sought to secure for themselves
a monopoly of purchases and a monopoly of sales. By a further provision,
although American ships might take goods to England, the carrying-trade
between the different colonies was strictly confined to British ships.
Next, in order to protect British manufacturers from competition, it was
thought necessary to prohibit the colonists from manufacturing. They
might grow wool, but it must be carried to England to be wove