ong outlast the French occupation of Canada. The opposition
to Grenville's colonial legislation, which gathered force with every
additional measure, seemed now about to confirm these predictions.

No single law of these early years would have caused its proper part of
the resistance which all of them in fact brought about. A measure of
oppression could be attributed to each of them, but the pressure of any
one was not felt by all classes or all colonies alike. The Proclamation
of 1763 was an offense chiefly to speculators in land, and to those
border communities that had fought to open free passage to the West only
to find the fertile Ohio valleys "reserved to the Indians"--the very
tribes which had brought death and desolation to the frontier. The Sugar
Act was a greater grievance to the New England distiller of rum and the
exporters of fish and lumber than it was to the rice and tobacco
planters of the South. New York merchants were seriously affected by
the Currency Act, which scarcely touched Massachusetts, and which, in
Virginia, meant money in the pockets of creditors, but bore hardly on
debtors and the speculators who bought silver at Williamsburg in
depreciated paper in order to sell it at par in Philadelphia. The famous
Stamp Act itself chiefly concerned the printers, lawyers, officeholders,
the users of the custom-house, and the litigious class that employed the
courts to enforce or resist the payment of debt.

Only when regarded as a whole was the policy of Grenville seen to spell
disaster. Each new law seemed carefully designed to increase the burdens
imposed by every other. The Sugar Act, for example, taken by itself, was
perhaps the most grievous of all. The British sugar islands, to which it
virtually restricted the West Indian trade of the Northern colonies,
offered no sufficient market for their lumber and provisions, nor could
they, like the Spanish islands, furnish the silver needed by continental
merchants to settle London balances on account of imported English
commodities. Exports to the West Indies and imports from England must,
therefore, be reduced; the one event would cripple essential colonial
industries such as the fisheries and the distilling of rum, while the
other would force the colonists to devote themselves to those very
domestic manufactures which it was the policy of the English Government
to discourage. These disadvantages, which attached to the Sugar Act
itself, were accentuated by