ither a
bond had to be given that the commodity would be transported to England,
or a duty had to be paid, in money or in goods sufficiently onerous to
protect the English merchant and shipowner against serious colonial
competition in the carrying trade.

The above act was followed up by another providing penalties for
attempted violation of the customs laws. In this statute no mention was
made of the plantations and its general tenor indicated that it was
intended to apply to Great Britain only, providing, as it did, for the
searching of houses and dwellings for smuggled goods by virtue of a writ
of assistance under the seal of His Majesty's court of exchequer. Under
William the Third, who was as arbitrary a monarch toward the colonies as
the second James had been, the statute was made directly applicable to
the plantation trade, with the provision that "the like assistance shall
be given to the said officers in the execution of their office, as by the
last-mentioned act is provided for the officers in England." It was on
the question of whether such a writ could be issued from a colonial court
that James Otis made the famous speech in which he arraigned the
commercial policy of England, stripped the veil of reform from the bust
of the Stadtholder-King, and awakened the colonists to a throbbing sense
of English oppression and of American wrongs--the oration which, in the
language of John Adams, who heard it, "breathed into this nation the
breath of life."

* * *

It is needless to follow the numerous Acts of Trade in their order, for
they were all in a line with the accepted and established principle of
that age in England that the colonies should minister to the commercial
aggrandizement of the mother country, instead of being the centres of an
independent traffic, that they should be communities for the consumption
of British manufactures and the feeding of British trade. New England was
especially the object of English jealousy and restriction, and for
reasons, as given by Sir Josiah Child, in his "New Discourse on Trade,"
written about the year 1677, that are creditable to the founders of those
States, for after speaking of the people of Virginia and the Barbadoes as
a loose vagrant sort, "vicious and destitute of means to live at home,
gathered up about the streets of London or other places, and who, had
there been no English foreign plantation in the world, must have co