r had
moved the colonies into a perilous foreground. Their interests had cost
much in men and money, and had been worth all that they had cost, and
more; the benefits conferred upon them had been immense, yet were
recognized as not being in excess of their real importance, present and
future. Worst of all, the magnitude of their financial resources had
been made apparent; without a murmur, without visible injury to their
prosperity, they had voluntarily raised large sums by taxation.
Meanwhile the English treasury had been put to enormous charges, and the
English people groaned beneath the unwonted tax burdens which they had
to bear. The attention of British financiers, even before the war was
over, was turned toward the colonies, as a field of which the productive
capacity had never been developed.

So soon as peace brought to the government leisure to adjust domestic
matters in a thorough manner, the scheme for colonial taxation came to
the front. "America ... became the great subject of consideration; ...
and the minister who was charged with its government took the lead in
public business."[16] This minister was at first Charles Townshend, than
whom no man in England, it was supposed, knew more of the transatlantic
possessions. His scheme involved a standing army of 25,000 men in the
provinces, to be supported by taxes to be raised there. In order to
obtain this revenue he first gave his care to the revision of the
navigation act. Duties which had been so high that they had never been
collected he now proposed to reduce and to enforce. This was designed to
be only the first link in the chain, but before he could forge others
he had to go out of office with the Bute ministry. The change in the
cabinet, however, made no change in the colonial policy; that was not
"the wish of this man or that man," but apparently of nearly all English
statesmen.

[Note 16: Bancroft, _Hist. U. S._ iv. 28.]

So in March, 1763, George Grenville, in the treasury department, took up
the plan which Townshend had laid down. Grenville was commercially
minded, and his first efforts were in the direction of regulating the
trade of the colonies so as to carry out with much more stringency and
thoroughness than heretofore three principles: first, that England
should be the only shop in which a colonist could purchase; second, that
colonists should not make for themselves those articles which England
had to sell to them; third, that the people