es
played their part, in imagination clothing their governors in the
decaying vesture of old-world tyrants and themselves assuming the
homespun garb, half Roman and half Puritan, of a virtuous republicanism.
Small matters were thus stamped with great character. To debate a point
of procedure in the Boston or Williamsburg assembly was not, to be sure,
as high a privilege as to obstruct legislation in Westminster; but men
of the best American families, fashioning their minds as well as their
houses on good English models, thought of themselves, in withholding a
governor's salary or limiting his executive power, as but reenacting
on a lesser stage the great parliamentary struggles of the seventeenth
century. It was the illusion of sharing in great events rather than any
low mercenary motive that made Americans guard with jealous care their
legislative independence; a certain hypersensitiveness in matters of
taxation they knew to be the virtue of men standing for liberties which
Englishmen had once won and might lose before they were aware.

As a matter of course, therefore, the colonial assemblies protested
against the measures of Grenville. The General Court of Massachusetts
instructed its agent to say that the Sugar Act would ruin the New
England fisheries upon which the industrial prosperity of the northern
colonies depended. What they would lose was set down with some care,
in precise figures: the fishing trade, "estimated at 164,000 pounds per
annum; the vessels employed in it, which would be nearly useless, at
100,000 pounds; the provisions used in it, the casks for packing fish,
and other articles, at 22,700 pounds and upwards: to all which there
was to be added the loss of the advantage of sending lumber, horses,
provisions, and other commodities to the foreign plantations as cargoes,
the vessels employed to carry the fish to Spain and Portugal, the
dismissing of 5,000 seamen from their employment," besides many other
losses, all arising from the very simple fact that the British islands
to which the trade of the colonies was virtually confined by the Sugar
Act could furnish no sufficient market for the products of New England,
to say nothing of the middle colonies, nor a tithe of the molasses and
other commodities now imported from the foreign islands in exchange.

Of the things taken in exchange, silver, in coin and bullion, was not
the least important, since it was essential for the "remittances to
England for