sobeyed and contemned so openly as
in New England. The people of Massachusetts Bay were from the first
disposed to act as if independent of the mother country."--Reeves, pp.
54, 58. The particular quotations apply to the early days of the
measure, 1662-3; but the complaint continued to the end. In 1764-5,
"one of the great grievances in the American trade was, that great
quantities of foreign molasses and syrups were clandestinely run on
shore in the British Colonies."--p. 79.

[53] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. i. p. 82.

CHAPTER II

FROM INDEPENDENCE TO JAY'S TREATY, 1794

The colonial connection between Great Britain and the thirteen
communities which became the original States of the American Union was
brought to a formal conclusion in 1776, by their Declaration of
Independence. Substantially, however, it had already terminated in
1774. This year was marked by the passage of the Boston Port Bill,
with its accessory measures, by the British Parliament, and likewise
by the renewal, in the several colonies, of the retaliatory
non-importation agreements of 1765. The fundamental theory of the
eighteenth century concerning the relations between a mother country
and her colonies, that of reciprocal exclusive benefit, had thus in
practice yielded to one of mutual injury; to coercion and deprivation
on the one side, and to passive resistance on the other. On September
5 the representatives of twelve colonies assembled in Philadelphia;
Georgia alone sending no delegates, but pledging herself in
anticipation to accept the decisions taken by the others. One of the
first acts of this Congress of the Continental Colonies was to indorse
the resolutions by which Massachusetts had placed herself in an
attitude of contingent rebellion against the Crown, and to pledge
their support to her in case of a resort to arms. These several steps
were decisive and irrevocable, except by an unqualified abandonment,
by one party or the other, of the principles which underlay and
dictated them. The die was cast. To use words attributed to George the
Third, "the colonies must now either submit or triumph."

The period which here began, viewed in the aggregate of the national
life of the United States, was one of wavering transition and
uncertain issue in matters political and commercial. Its ending, in
these two particulars, is marked by two conspicuous events: the
adoption of the Constitution and the Commercial Treat