upon the revenues
of the colonies. Together the king and his friends pushed through
Parliament the legislation which was to secure their purposes. To meet
any such danger as in the recent French and Indian wars, ten thousand
soldiers were to be quartered on the colonies, which were to pay for
their maintenance. Certain sops to public sentiment were given, in the
shape of concessions, yet new restrictions were laid on foreign trade.
And finally and most important, a stamp-tax, the easiest to collect, was
laid on business and legal formalities of all kinds. After its passage
no land title might be passed, no legal papers issued, no ship might
clear from a home port, without a stamp affixed to the necessary
documents. Not even inheritances might be transferred, nor marriages be
legalized.

This was the first internal taxation laid by England on America. A word
is necessary as to the meaning of the phrase in those days. An external
tax, perhaps merely an export duty, was levied and paid in England; its
effect was seen in higher prices in the colonies. Internal taxation
would include all taxes actually paid in America on goods coming from
England. The provisions of the Sugar Act were regarded as "trade
restrictions," and not as intended to raise an English revenue.

There is perhaps no better place to discuss the justice of the
Revolution than right here. Even to-day the illegality, the utter
wrongfulness of the American position, is occasionally raised among us
by those who see the great obligations to the mother country under which
the colonies lay, and who recall the needless hardships suffered by the
wretched Tories, the martyrs of a lost cause. Doubtless wrongs were
inflicted in the course of the struggle, and the great expenditures of
England were in large part unrequited. But it must be remembered that
the world had not yet reached the point where the losers in a war were
gently treated, and that no amount of financial obligation will ever
compel to the acceptance of political servitude. By habit of mind and
force of circumstances America had developed a political theory
puzzlingly novel to the old world and as yet not thoroughly understood
by the new. It was upon this unformulated theory that all future
differences were to arise. It interfered in all affairs in which the
question arose: Should the colonies be governed, and especially should
they be taxed, without a voice in their own affairs?

No one in England d