rive ten thousand more into other vocations. But the power of the
ministry forced the bills through, though twenty-one peers joined in a
solemn protest. "We dissent," said they, "because the attempt to coerce,
by famine, the whole body of the inhabitants of great and populous
provinces, is without example in the history of this, or, perhaps, of any
civilized nations." This was in 1775, and the revolution in America had
already begun. It was the policy of Lord North to force the colonists to
stop their opposition to unjust and offensive laws by imposing upon them
other laws more unjust and more offensive still--a sort of homeopathic
treatment, not infrequently applied by tyrants, but which seldom proves
effective. In this case it aligned the New England fishermen to a man with
the Revolutionists. A Tory fisherman would have fared as hard as

"Old Floyd Ireson for his hard heart
Tarr'd and feathered and carried in a cart,
By the woman of Marblehead."

Nor was this any inconsiderable or puny element which Lord North had
deliberately forced into revolt. Massachusetts alone had at the outbreak
of the Revolution five hundred fishing vessels, and the town of Marblehead
one hundred and fifty sea-going fishing schooners. Gloucester had nearly
as many, and all along the coast, from Maine to New York, there were
thrifty settlers, farmers and fishermen, by turns, as the season served.
New England was preeminently a maritime state. Its people had early
discovered that a livelihood could more easily be plucked from the green
surges of ocean, white-capped as they sometimes were, than wrested from
the green and boulder-crowned hills. Upon the fisheries rested practically
all the foreign commerce. They were the foundation upon which were built
the superstructure of comfort and even luxury, the evidences of which are
impressive even in the richer New England of to-day. Therefore, when the
British ministry attacked this calling, it roused against the crown not
merely the fisherman and the sailor, but the merchants as well--not only
the denizens of the stuffy forecastles of pinks and schooners, but the
owners of the fair great houses in Boston and New Bedford. Lord North's
edicts stopped some thousands of sturdy sailors from catching cod and
selling them to foreign peoples. They accordingly became privateers, and
preyed upon British commerce until it became easier for a mackerel to slip
through the meshes of a seine than for a