ey were not severely felt among a people
devoted, in the country to agriculture, and in the towns to local traffic
and shipping, and the American farmer who wore homespun attire, did not
realize the harshness or appreciate the purpose of the statute which
prohibited the export of wool, or woolen manufactures. As for the
Southern planter, the question of fostering domestic manufactures never
entered his thoughts. He raised his tobacco and his cotton, exported them
to England, and got what goods he needed there just as his descendants,
in a later age, procured the manufactured necessities and luxuries of
life from the depots of New England trade.[1]

[1] "English Free Trade; Its Foundation, Growth and Decline." By
Henry Mann.

But even if the British Parliament had never attempted to raise a revenue
by taxation in the American colonies, it is probable that in time the
restrictions on commerce would have led to revolution, unless rescinded.
This was the opinion of the shrewd observer Du Chatelet, who, after
France had surrendered her American possessions to Great Britain, said
that "they (the chambers of commerce) regard everything in colonial
commerce which does not turn exclusively to the benefit of the kingdom as
contrary to the end for which colonies were established, and as a theft
from the state. To practice on these maxims is impossible. The wants of
trade are stronger than the laws of trade. The north of America can alone
furnish supplies to its south. This is the only point of view under which
the cession of Canada can be regarded as a loss for France; but that
cession will one day be amply compensated, if it shall cause in the
English colonies the rebellion and the independence which become every
day more probable and more near."

* * *

America, if not contented, was quiet under restrictive laws not
stringently enforced, and but for the measures initiated by Grenville and
Townshend, and approved by the king, the Parliament and the people of
England, there would, if the leading American minds of that day were
sincere, have been no insurrection in that era against British authority.
George the Third is called a tyrant on every recurring Fourth of July,
but the nation he ruled was as tyrannical as he, and impartial history
cannot condemn the monarch without awarding a greater share of odium to
his people, who sustained by their pronounced opinion and through