almost every other cardinal measure of
Grenville's colonial policy. With the chief source of colonial specie
cut off, the Stamp Act increased the demand for it by L60,000; when the
need for paper money as a legal tender was more than ever felt, its
further use was shortly to be forbidden altogether; when the diminished
demand for labor, occasioned by restrictions upon the West Indian trade,
was likely to stimulate migration into the interior, the West was closed
to settlement. And the close of the French war, which had raised the
debt of the colonies to an unprecedented figure, was the moment selected
for restricting trade, remodeling the monetary system, and imposing upon
the colonies taxes for protection against a danger which no longer
threatened. Little wonder that to the colonial mind the measures of
Grenville carried all the force of an argument from design: any part,
separated from the whole, might signify nothing; the perfect correlation
of the completed scheme was evidence enough that somewhere a malignant
purpose was at work bent upon the destruction of English liberties.

Members of the House of Commons who yawned while voting the new laws
were amazed at the commotion they raised in America. In all the colonies
scarcely a man was to be found to defend any of them. Those afterwards
known as loyalists, with Hutchinson, Colden, Dulaney, and Galloway as
their most distinguished representatives, were of one accord with the
Lees, with Patrick Henry, with Dickinson, and the Adamses, in asserting
that the Stamp Act and the Sugar Act were inexpedient and unjust.
Hutchinson urged the repeal of both measures. Colden assured the Board
of Trade that the Currency Act, so far as New York was concerned, was
uncalled for and very prejudicial to colonial industry and the
manufactures of England. The three-penny duty on molasses, said Samuel
Adams, will make useless one third of the fish now caught, and so
remittances to Spain, Portugal, and other countries, "through which
money circulates into England for the purchase of her goods of all
kinds," must cease. "Unless we are allowed a paper currency," Daniel
Coxe wrote to Reed, "they need not send tax gatherers, for they can
gather nothing--never was money so very scarce as now." Governor Bernard
expressed the belief that if the proposed measures were executed "there
will soon be an end to the specie currency of Massachusetts."
Undoubtedly the general opinion of America was voiced