whatsoever; and requiring of every candidate that, within the year before the election, he should have received the sacrament according to the rites of the church of England.

The Book of Common Prayer and the ceremonies, having never been abrogated by law, revived with the restoration. From Holland the king had in some measure laid asleep the watchfulness of those whom he most feared, by promising that the scruples of the Presbyterians should be respected; and, with regard to ceremonies, pretended that he would have none to receive the sacrament on the knees or to use the cross in baptism. Cranmer saw no intrinsic difference between bishops and priests; and "the old common, moderate sort" of Episcopalians had taken Episcopacy to be good, but not necessary, and owned the reformed churches of the continent to be true ones. Episcopal ordination was now, for the first time," so writes a great English historian, " made an indispensable qualification for church preferment." The reformed churches, alike of England and the continent, were excluded from fellowship with the Anglican church. Every minister, who should not, before the twenty-fourth of August, 1662, publicly declare his assent and consent to everything contained in the Book of Common Prayer, was by his silence deprived of his benefice; and on that day nearly two thousand persons gave up their livings rather than stain their consciences. The subscription was required even of schoolmasters: at one swoop, the right of teaching was taken away from every person in England, except churchmen.

An act of 1664 made attendance at a dissenting place of worship a crime, to be punished, on conviction without a jury, before a single justice of the peace, by long imprisonment for the first and second offence, and by seven years' transportation for the third. But the exiled Calvinist might not be shipped to New England, where he would have found sympathy and an open career. To strike a death blow at non-conformity, a statute of 1665 required the deprived to swear that it is not lawful, under any pretext whatsoever, to take arms against the king, and that they would not at any time endeavor any alteration in church or state. Those who refused this oath were forbidden to come within five miles of any city, corporate

town, borough sending members to parliament, or towns where they had themselves resided as ministers.

To the Anglican church this total expulsion of the Calvinists wrought evil, while every terrible oppression of dissenters in England, in Scotland, or in Ireland, drove the best of them to America.

The American colonies were held to be subordinate to the English parliament, and bound by its acts, whenever they were specially named in a statute or clearly embraced within its provisions. But Massachusetts had refused to be subject to the laws of parliament, and had remonstrated against such subjection, as "the loss of English liberty." The Long Parliament had conceded the justice of the remonstrance.

On the restoration of Charles II., the convention parliament in 1660 granted to the monarch a subsidy of twelvepence in the pound—that is, of five per cent--on all merchandise exported from or imported into the kingdom of England, "any dominion thereto belonging." The tax was never levied in the colonies; nor was it understood that the colonies were bound by a statute, unless they were expressly named.

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That distinctness was not wanting, when it was required by the interests of English merchants. The navigation act of the commonwealth had not been designed to trammel the commerce of the colonies; the convention parliament connected in one act the protection of English shipping and a monopoly to the English merchant of the trade with the colonies. In the reign of Richard II., the commerce of English ports had been secured to English shipping: the act of navigation of 1651 had done no more. The present act renewed the same provisions, and added: "No merchandise shall be imported into the plantations but in English vessels, navigated by Englishmen, under penalty of forfeiture." Henceforward, no one but a native or naturalized subject might become a merchant or factor in any English settlement.

American industry offered articles for exportation of two kinds. Some were produced in quantities only in America, and would not compete in the English market with English productions. These were enumerated, and it was declared that none of them-that is, no sugar, tobacco, ginger, indigo,

cotton, fustic, dyeing woods-shall be transported to any other country than those belonging to the crown of England, under penalty of forfeiture; and, as new articles of industry of this class grew up, they were added to the list. But such other commodities as the English merchant might not find convenient to buy, the American planter might ship to foreign markets; the farther off the better, because they would thus interfere less with the trades which were carried on in England. The colonists were, therefore, by a clause in the navigation act, confined to ports south of Cape Finis

terre.

Hardly had time enough elapsed for a voyage or two across the Atlantic, before it was found that the English merchant might derive still further advantages at the cost of the colonists. A new law, of 1663, prohibited the importation of European commodities into the colonies, except in English ships from England, to the end that England might be made the staple not only of colonial productions but of colonial supplies. Thus the colonists were compelled to buy in England not only all English manufactures, but everything else that they might need from any soil but their own.

The activity of the shipping of New England excited envy in the minds of the English merchants. The produce of the plantations of the southern colonies were brought to New England, as a result of colonial exchanges. In 1673, parliament therefore resolved to exclude New England merchants from competing with the English in the markets of the southern plantations; the liberty of free traffic between the colonies was accordingly taken away; and enumerated commodities exported from one colony to another were subjected to a duty equivalent to the duty on the consumption of these commodities in England.

By degrees, the greed of English shopkeepers became bolder; and America was forbidden, by act of parliament, not merely to manufacture those articles which might compete with the English in foreign markets, but even to supply herself, by her own industry, with those articles which her position enabled her to manufacture with success.

The policy of Great Britain, with respect to her colonies,

was a system of monopoly, adopted after the example of Spain, and for more than a century inflexibly pursued, in no less than twenty-nine acts of parliament. The colonists were allowed to sell to foreigners only what England would not take; so that they might gain means to pay for the articles forced upon them by England. The colonies could buy European and all foreign commodities only at the shops of the metropolis; and thus the merchant of the mother country could sell his goods for a little more than they were worth. England gained at the expense of America. The profit of the one was balanced by the loss of the other.

In the sale of their products, the colonists were equally injured. The English, being the sole purchasers, could obtain those products at a little less than their fair value. The merchant of Bristol or London was made richer; the planter of Virginia or Maryland was made poorer. No new value was created; one lost what the other gained; and both parties had equal claims to the benevolence of the legislature.

Thus the colonists were wronged, both in their purchases and in their sales; the law "cut them with a double edge." The English consumer gained nothing; for the surplus colonial produce was re-exported to other nations. The English merchant, not the English people, profited by the injustice. Moreover, the navigation act involved England in contradictions; she was herself a monopolist of her own colonial trade, and yet steadily aimed at sharing the trade of the Spanish settlements.

In the domestic policy of England, the act increased the tendency to unequal legislation. The English merchant having become the sole factor for American colonies, and the manufacturer claiming to supply colonial wants, the English landholder consented to uphold the artificial system only by sharing in its emoluments; and, in 1663, corn laws began to be enacted, in order to secure the profits of capital, applied to agriculture, against foreign and colonial competition. The system which impoverished the Virginia planter, by lowering the price of his tobacco crop, oppressed the English laborer, by raising the price of his bread; and at last a whig ministry offered a bounty on the exportation of corn.

Durable relations in society are correlative and reciprocally beneficial. In this case, the statute was made by one party to bind the other, and was made on iniquitous principles. Established as the law of the strongest, it could endure no longer than the superiority in force. It converted commerce, which should be the bond of peace, into a source of rankling hostility, and contained a pledge of the ultimate independence of America.

To the colonists, the navigation acts were an unmitigated evil; for the prohibition of planting tobacco in England and Ireland was useless. As a mode of taxing the colonies, the monopoly was a failure; the contribution was made to the merchant, not to the treasury of the public.

The usual excuse for colonial restrictions is founded on the principle that colonies were established at the cost of the mother country for that very purpose. Of the American colonies, the state founded not one. Virginia was begun by private companies; New England was the home of exiles, whom England owned as her children only to oppress them!

The monopoly, it must be allowed, was of the least injurious kind. It was conceded not to an individual, nor to a company, nor to a single city, but to all Englishmen.

The history of the navigation acts would be incomplete were it not added that, whatever party obtained a majority, it never, till the colonies gained great strength, occurred to the British parliament that the legislation was a wrong. Bigotry is not exclusively a passion of religious superstition; it is the obstinate, unreasoning, and merciless zeal with which selfishness in power upholds an unjust interest. The English parliament, as the instrument of mercantile eagerness for gain, had no scruple in commencing the legislation, which, when the colonists grew powerful, was, by the greatest British economist, declared to be "a manifest violation of the rights of mankind."