n into
cloth; they might smelt iron, but it must be carried to England to be
made into ploughshares. Finally, in order to protect British farmers and
their landlords, corn-laws were enacted, putting a prohibitory tariff on
all kinds of grain and other farm produce shipped from the colonies to
ports in Great Britain.

Such absurd and tyrannical laws had begun to be made in the reign of
Charles II., and by 1750 not less than twenty-nine acts of parliament
had been passed in this spirit. If these laws had been strictly
enforced, the American Revolution would probably have come sooner than
it did. In point of fact they were seldom strictly enforced, because so
long as the French were a power in America the British government felt
that it could not afford to irritate the colonists. In spite of laws to
the contrary, the carrying-trade between the different colonies was
almost monopolized by vessels owned, built, and manned in New England;
and the smuggling of foreign goods into Boston and New York and other
seaport towns was winked at.

[Sidenote: Writs of assistance.]

It was in 1761, immediately after the overthrow of the French in Canada,
that attempts were made to enforce the revenue laws more strictly than
heretofore; and trouble was at once threatened. Charles Paxton, the
principal officer of the custom-house in Boston, applied to the Superior
Court to grant him the authority to use "writs of assistance" in
searching for smuggled goods. A writ of assistance was a general
search-warrant, empowering the officer armed with it to enter, by force
if necessary, any dwelling-house or warehouse where contraband goods
were supposed to be stored or hidden. A special search-warrant was one
in which the name of the suspected person, and the house which it was
proposed to search, were accurately specified, and the goods which it
was intended to seize were as far as possible described. In the use of
such special warrants there was not much danger of gross injustice or
oppression, because the court would not be likely to grant one unless
strong evidence could be brought against the person whom it named. But
the general search-warrant, or "writ of assistance," as it was called
because men try to cover up the ugliness of hateful things by giving
them innocent names, was quite a different affair. It was a blank form
upon which the custom-house officer might fill in the names of persons
and descriptions of houses and goods to suit