was impossible;
and Grenville, more concerned with what was equitable than with what was
politic, pressed forward with his measure to require the use of stamped
paper for nearly all legal documents and customs papers, for
appointments to offices carrying a salary of L20 except military and
judicial offices, for grants of franchises, for licenses to sell
liquor, for packages containing playing-cards and dice, for all
pamphlets, advertisements, hand-bills, calendars, almanacs, and
newspapers. The revenue which might be raised by this law, estimated at
L60,000, was to be paid into the exchequer, and to be expended solely
for supporting the British troops in America.

At the time there were few men either in England or in the colonies who
imagined that the Stamp Act would release forces that were destined to
disrupt the empire. It was scarcely debated in the House of Commons.
"There has been nothing of note in Parliament," wrote Horace Walpole,
"but one slight day on the American taxes." And even in America few men
supposed that it would not be executed, however much they might dislike
it. It was impossible to prevent the passage of the act, Franklin
assured his friends. "We might as well have hindered the sun's setting.
That we could not do. But since 't is down, my friend, ... let us make
as good a night as we can. We may still light candles." It was not
candles alone that were lighted, but a conflagration; a conflagration
which soon spread from the New World to the Old and burned away, as with
a renovating flame, so much that was both good and bad in that amiable
eighteenth-century society.

II

If the experience of the last French war convinced the English
Government that a stricter control of the colonies was necessary, the
conquest of Canada convinced the colonists that they could defend
themselves, and at the same time removed the only danger which had ever
made them feel the need of English protection. As early as 1711, Le
Ronde Denys warned the New Englanders that the expulsion of the French
from North America would leave England free to suppress colonial
liberties, while another French writer predicted that it would rather
enable, the colonies to "unite, shake off the yoke of the English
monarchy, and erect themselves into a democracy." The prediction was
often repeated. Between 1730 and 1763, many men, among them Montesquieu,
Peter Kalm, and Turgot, asserted that colonial dependence upon England
would not l