of criminals. The colonists resented the action of
Great Britain in annulling the colonial laws made to keep out slaves.
It is melancholy to reflect that the curse of slavery, for which
Englishmen of later days often so bitterly and so rightly reproached
America, was unhappily enforced upon a country struggling to be rid of
it by Englishmen who called themselves English statesmen. The
colonists resented the astonishing restrictions which it pleased the
mother country to place, in what she believed to be her own interest,
upon colonial trade. These laws commanded that all trade between the
colonies should be carried on in ships built in England or the
colonies. This barred out all foreigners, especially the Dutch, then
the chief carriers for Europe. They compelled the American farmer to
send his products across the ocean to England. They forbade the
exportation of sugar, tobacco, cotton, wool, indigo, ginger,
dyeing-woods to any part of the world except to England or some English
colony. They only allowed exportation of fish, fur, oil, ashes, and
lumber in ships built in England or the colonies. They forced the
colonists to buy all their European goods in England and bring them
over to America in English vessels. They prohibited the colonial
manufacture of any article that could be manufactured in England. They
harassed and minimized the trade between one colony and another. No
{83} province was permitted to send woollen goods, hats, or ironware to
another province. Some of the regulations read more like the rules of
some Turkish pashalik than the laws framed by one set of Englishmen for
another set of Englishmen. In the Maine woods, for instance, no tree
that had a diameter greater than two feet at a foot above the ground
could be cut down, except to make a mast for some ship of the Royal
Navy.

Bad and bitter as these laws were in theory, they did not for long
enough prove to be so bad in practice, for the simple reason that they
were very easy to evade and not very easy to enforce. The colonists
met what many of them regarded as an elaborate system for the
restriction of colonial trade by a no less elaborate system of
smuggling. Smuggling was easy because of the long extent of sea-coast.
Smuggling was lucrative, as few considered it an offence to evade laws
that were generally resented as unfair. When the Sugar Act of 1733
prohibited the importation of sugar and molasses from the French West
Indies ex