o find "a mode by which a revenue may be drawn
from America without offense." Since the Americans admit that external
taxes are legal, he said, let us lay an external tax. Backed by the
king, he accordingly procured from Parliament, in May of the same year,
an act laying duties on glass, red and white lead, paper, and tea. The
revenue to be derived from the law, estimated at L40,000, was to be
applied to the payment of the salaries of royal governors and of judges
in colonial courts. A second act established a board of commissioners to
be stationed in America for the better enforcement of the Trade Acts;
while a third, known as the Restraining Act, suspended the New York
Assembly until it should have made provision for the troops according to
the terms of the Mutiny Act.

The Townshend Acts revived the old controversy, not quite in the old
manner. Mobs were less in evidence than in 1765, although riots
occasioned by business depression disturbed the peace of New York in the
winter of 1770, and the presence of the troops in Boston, the very sight
of which was an offense to that civic community, resulted in the famous
"massacre" of the same year. Yet the duties were collected without much
difficulty; and although the income derived from them amounted to almost
nothing, the commissioners reorganized the customs service so
successfully that an annual revenue of L30,000 was obtained at a cost of
L13,000 to collect. Forcible resistance was, indeed, less practicable in
dealing with the Townshend Acts than in the case of the Stamp Act; but
it was also true that men of character and substance, many of whom in
1765 had not been "averse to a little rioting," now realized that mobs
and the popular mass meeting undermined at once the security of property
rights and their own long-established supremacy in colonial politics.
Desiring to protect their privileges against encroachment from the
English Government without sharing them with the unfranchised populace,
they were therefore more concerned than before to employ only
constitutional and peaceful methods of obtaining redress. To this end
they resorted to non-importation agreements, to petition and protest, so
well according with English tradition, and to the reasoned argument, of
which the most notable in this period was that series of _Farmer's
Letters_ which made the name of John Dickinson familiar in Europe and a
household word throughout the colonies.

If in point of action th