rced,
were laid upon rum, molasses, and sugar imported from foreign islands
into the continental colonies. The purpose of these laws, and of the
supplementary acts, of which more than half a hundred were passed
between 1689 and 1765, was to foster the industries of the empire at the
expense of foreign countries, and to develop colonial industry along
lines that did not bring it into competition with English agriculture or
manufactures.

Information gathered by the Privy Council committees, which the Stuarts
appointed to cooerdinate the work of managing trade and the plantations,
soon demonstrated that it was easier to make laws than it was to enforce
them. Until the end of the century, illicit trade, inseparably connected
with piracy, became increasingly flagrant in nearly every colony. West
Indian buccaneers, lineal descendants of the Elizabethan "sea dogues,"
nesting at Jamaica under English sanction until after the peace with
Spain in 1670, resorted to Charleston, New York, Providence, or Boston,
and under licenses granted by royal governors joined hands with the
colonial free-trader or East Indian "interlopers" to make the acts of
trade a byword and a reproach. New England and Dutch merchants,
"regarding neither the acts of trade nor the law of nature," carried
provisions to Canada during the French wars. Tobacco was taken to
Holland and Scotland, or smuggled from Maryland through Pennsylvania
into the Northern colonies. Bolted flour and provisions were exchanged
by New York traders in the Spanish islands for molasses and rum.
European commodities and the spices and fabrics of the Orient, secured
at trifling cost from pirates or "interlopers" in exchange for rum or
Spanish pieces of eight, were carried in small boats up the innumerable
estuaries that indent the coast from New England to Virginia. Indolent
governors were often ignorant of the law; dishonest ones, willing for
money down to wink at its violation; and even those, like Bellomont,
who were honest and energetic, found themselves without the necessary
machinery for its effective enforcement.

If the violation of the Trade Acts called loudly for a more direct
supervision of the colonies, the growing menace of Canada enforced the
same lesson. Under the imbecile Charles II, Spain was no longer, as in
Elizabethan times, the first danger. Colbert's attention to colonial
affairs, as well as Louis XIV's European ambitions, soon obscured the
commercial rivalry of