mmerce flourishing, the revenues increasing, our navigation the
bulwark of the kingdom, in a state of growth and extension, and the
colonies, from inclination, duty, and interest, attached to the mother
country."

"Such a number of petitions from every part of the kingdom, pregnant
with so many interesting facts, stated and attested by such numbers of
people, whose lives had been entirely devoted to trade, and who must be
naturally supposed to be competent judges of a subject which they had so
long and so closely attended to (besides that it showed the general
sense of the nation), could not fail of having great weight with the
House." (Annual Register for 1766, Vol. IX., Chap, vii., pp. 35, 36.)]

[Footnote 275: Ramsay's Colonial History, Vol. I., p. 348.

"At the same time that the Stamp Act was repealed, the absolute and
unlimited supremacy of Parliament was, in words, asserted. The opposers
of repeal contended for this as essential. The friends of that measure
acquiesced in it, to strengthen their party and make sure of their
object. Many of both sides thought that the dignity of Great Britain
required something of the kind to counterbalance the loss of authority
that might result from her yielding to the clamours of the colonists.
The Act for this purpose was called the Declaratory Act, and was, in
principle, more hostile to America's rights than the Stamp Act; for it
annulled those resolutions and acts of the Provincial Assemblies in
which they had asserted their right to exemption from all taxes not
imposed by their own representatives; and also enacted that the King and
Parliament had, and of right ought to have, power to bind the colonies
in all cases whatsoever."--_Ib._, p. 349.]

[Footnote 276: "The aborigines were never formidable in battle until
they became supplied with the weapons of European invention."
(Bancroft's History of the United States, Vol. I., p. 401.)]

[Footnote 277: The treatment of the Indians by the early New England
Puritans is one of the darkest pages in English colonial history. I have
slightly alluded to it in the preceding pages of this volume. Many
passages might be selected from the early divines of New England,
referring to the Indians as the heathen whom they were to drive out of
the land which God had given to this Israel. I will confine myself to
the quotation of a few words from the late Rev. J.B. Marsden, A.M.,
noted for his Puritan partialities, in the two volumes of his