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left to the vigorous English commonwealths and to decaying Spain, with a dividing line, temporarily, at the great central river. The continent was destined to be English in speech and civilization.

III. ENGLISH CONTROL VS. AMERICAN LIBERTY

183. The seventy years from the English Revolution to the American Revolution have been called "a forgotten half century." In internal development there are no brilliant episodes, no heroic figures, and no new principles. Much was done, however, in extending institutions already established. The central theme is the continuance of that inevitable conflict that appeared in the preceding period (§ 177). Under the pressure of ceaseless war, England felt, even more keenly than before, the need of controlling her colonies; and the colonies, realizing dimly their growing strength, felt more and more their right to regulate their own affairs.

The projects of the English government to extend its influence in the colonies had two phases, commercial and political. 184. Several new Navigation Acts extended the old commercial policy of the home country. To the "enumerated articles be exported only through England (§ 138), rice was added in 1706, and copper, naval stores,1 and beaver skins in 1722.

to

More important was a new kind of restriction upon American industry, a series of attempts to restrict or prohibit manufactures. In 1696, a parliament of William III forbade any colony to export, even to England or to any other colony, any woolen manufacture. In 1732, exportation of hats 2 was forbidden. Legislation of this sort had no such excuse as the earlier navigation laws. The motive now was plain jealousy on the part of English manufacturers.

1 England compensated the colonies by paying generous bounties upon such materials sent to her.

2 Making hats from beaver skins had been a prominent industry in some northern colonies and in Pennsylvania.

Bad as this was, the restrictions upon manufacturing so far were indirect: no colony had been forbidden to make any article for its own consumption. But in 1750 (almost at the close of the period) the erection or use of iron mills was prohibited altogether. Unlike the unpleasant features of the earlier commercial restrictions, too, this law could not be evaded. The half dozen iron

COLONIAL FIREPLACE AND UTENSILS, "BROADHEARTH," Saugus, Massa

chusetts. In this house, built in 1646, lived the first iron founder in America. The works were situated near by and were successfully carried on for a hundred years. Cf. page 75.

mills that had appeared in the northern colonies were closed, and all manufacture of iron ceased, except for nails, bolts, and the simpler household and farm implements, such as in that day were turned out at the village smithy.

These English laws of 1696, 1732, and 1750 were selfish and sinister, the most ominous feature in all American colonial history. They must have become bitterly oppressive ere long, had the colonists continued under English rule; and at the time they fully deserved the condemnation visited upon them by the

§ 186]

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great English economist, Adam Smith: "Those prohibitions are only impertinent badges of slavery, imposed upon [the colonies] without sufficient reason by the groundless jealousy of the manufacturers of the mother country." 1

185. Another source of justifiable irritation was the "Sugar Act" of 1733 (Source Book, No. 100, c). This Act placed duties on sugar and molasses from "foreign plantations" so high as to prevent the colonists from getting these articles any longer from the French West Indies, except by smuggling. The purpose of the law was to compel the colonies on the continent to buy their sugar from another English colony, Jamaica, where the sugar planters were in financial distress: it aimed to take from the mass of American colonists for the benefit of a specially privileged class of colonists. It is said that the law was suggested by a Boston merchant who owned plantations in Jamaica.

186. Attempts by the English government at closer political control first took the form of efforts to make colonies into royal provinces. For sixty years Virginia had been the only royal province. In 1685 New York was added to this class, when its proprietor became king. William III, at the opening of his reign, made Massachusetts practically a royal government (§ 153); and, by a stretch of authority, he cut off New Hampshire from Massachusetts and gave it that kind of government. Then came a series of attempts to change all colonies into royal provinces. In the remaining charter and proprietary colonies the Board of Trade found many just grounds for complaint. Besides the old offenses (evasion of navigation laws, refusals to permit appeals to England, discrimination against the English Church, etc.), the Board was annoyed by Rhode Island's stubborn persistence in a shameful trade with pirates; by the refusal of Connecticut to let royal officers command her

1 Unhappily the colonists seem to have felt aggrieved quite as much by the well-intended, if not always tactful, efforts of England to preserve American forests from careless and greedy destruction, and to prevent the issue of dishonest colonial paper money.