nd to the ports of the various
provinces was either returned back by the vessel that brought it, or put
into a place of sate keeping. "Though the Stamp Act was to have operated
from the 1st of November, yet the legal proceedings in Courts were
carried on as before. Vessels entered and departed without stamped
papers. The printers boldly printed and circulated their newspapers, and
found a sufficient number of readers, though they used common paper, in
defiance of the Act of Parliament. In most departments, by common
consent, business was carried on as though no stamp law existed. This
was accompanied by spirited resolutions to risk all consequences rather
than submit to use the paper required by the Stamp Act. While these
matters were in agitation, the colonists entered into associations
against importing British manufactures till the Stamp Act should be
repealed. Agreeably to the free constitution of Great Britain, the
subject was at liberty to buy, or not to buy, as he pleased. By
suspending their future purchases until the repeal of the Stamp Act, the
colonists made it the interest of merchants and manufacturers in England
to solicit its repeal. They had usually taken so great a proportion of
British manufactures, amounting annually to two or three millions
sterling, that they threw some thousands in the mother country out of
employment, and induced them, from a regard to their own interest, to
advocate the measures wished for by America." (Ramsay's Colonial
History, Vol. I., pp. 345, 346).]

[Footnote 274: "Petitions were received by Parliament from the merchants
of London, Bristol, Lancaster, Liverpool, Hull, Glasgow, etc., and
indeed from most of the trading and manufacturing towns and boroughs in
the kingdom. In these petitions they set forth the great decay of their
trade, owing to the laws and regulations made for America; the vast
quantities of our manufactures (besides those articles imported from
abroad, which were enclosed either with our own manufactures or with the
produce of our colonies) which the American trade formerly took off our
hands; by all which many thousand manufacturers, seamen, and labourers
had been employed, to the very great and increasing benefit of the
nation. That in return for these exports the petitioners had received
from the colonies rice, indigo, tobacco, naval stores, oil, whale-fins,
furs, and lately potash, with other staple commodities, besides a large
balance of remittances b