April.

fication of confessing a defeat. The houses petitioned the king to summon a Convocation of the clergy to give their advice. The Nov. 20. Convocation met, and its temper was shown when Dr. Jane, the chief Oxford champion of the doctrine of passive obedience in the late reign, was chosen Prolocutor of the lower house by a majority of two to one over the liberal Tillotson. The bishops, as a body, were not averse to some indulgence to nonconformists. But the inferior clergy, disinclined to any concession of the sort, interposed all sorts of obstacles to the transaction of business. They wearied out the other party, and nothing was done. The favorable time for action by the civil government had been lost, for in the next Parliament the Tory party was so strongly reinforced, that there was no encouragement so much as to propose any plan of ecclesiastical reform, and the exclusive policy of the Church of England remains in vigor to the present day.

Another signally important measure of relief appeared to meet with favor on all sides, and if it had been matured in Parliament, would probably, in the circumstances, have encountered no opposition from the King, though on this subject he had practised a somewhat suspicious reserve, saying nothing in his "Declaration of Right" of either the restoration of charters, or the colonial maladministration of King James. In a bill which was introduced for the restoration of their char

ters to corporations which had been wrongfully deprived in the late reign, the colonies of New England were expressly specified. The bill was lost by the indiscretion of its advocates, 1690. who insisted on attaching to it some pro- Jan. 10. visions of an unreasonably vindictive character. The king did not like this far-reaching severity against Tories, and being at the same time displeased at some expressions in the House of Commons of disapprobation of an intention which he had announced of going over to command his troops in Ireland, he suddenly prorogued the Parliament. It was presently dissolved, and writs were issued for another election. The opportunity had gone by. The Whig party, which had taken the lead in the late Revolution, was offended and weakened by the want of a more liberal confidence on the king's part, and this demoralization, and the displeasure produced by the harsh tenor of measures proposed by it in the late Parliament against political March 20.

February.

offenders, gave the control of the new Parliament to the Tories, whose sensibility to the abuses of the late reign was already blunted.

The question about the charters was to be soon resolved, but from this time another element of discord in the relation of the colonies to the parent country was to grow in strength, till at length it should avail to sunder the tie between them.

With the Revolution which seated the Prince of Orange on the English throne, the commercial

interest in England obtained new importance, and the colonial system was vigorously developed. The colonial empire of England, now so vast, at that time comprehended not very much more than the settlements on the eastern seaboard of North America between Florida and New France, and a few islands of the West Indies, though already there were factories and forts on the Spanish Main, on the Gold Coast of Africa, and on both sides of the peninsula of Hindostan.

At so late a time as almost in the last days of the colonial subjection of New England, Edmund Burke set forth in a few words the accepted theory of the relation of colonies to their metropolis in terms expressing no sense of the vicious character of that system: "The ends to be answered are to make the new establishment as useful as possible to the trade of the mother country; to secure its dependence; to provide for the ease, safety, and happiness of the settlers; to protect them from their enemies; and to make an easy and effectual provision to preserve them from the tyranny and avarice of their governors, or the ill consequences of their own licentiousness; that they should not, by growing into an unbounded liberty, forget that they were subjects, or, lying under a base servitude, have no reason to think themselves British subjects. This is all that colonies, according to the present and best ideas of them, can or ought to be." Adam Smith recognized the fact of the application of this theory

in the dealings of England with her colonies in North America. "The first regulations," he says, “which she made with regard to them had always in view to secure to herself the monopoly of their commerce; to confine their market, and to enlarge her own at their expense; and consequently rather to damp and discourage than to quicken and forward the course of their prosperity." And he made no secret of his opinion of the character of this policy. He called it one of the "mean and malignant expedients of the mercantile system." "To prohibit a great people," he said, "from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous for themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.”

Oct. 9.

The legislation for restraining colonial trade for the benefit of the native Englishman began as far back as the time of the Commonwealth, when, by the "Act for Increase of Shipping and 1651. Encouragement of Navigation," commonly called the First Navigation Law, the colonist, prohibited from shipping his goods except in vessels built in Britain or a British colony, was precluded from making his bargain for freight wherever it could be had on the most favorable terms. From regulating the carrying trade, the legislation of Charles the Second passed to regulating the destination of the cargoes. By an Act of the first year after his restoration, colonial pro

1660.

1663.

duce could be carried nowhere else till it had first been landed in England; in other words, the colonial producer was obliged to sell his property on such terms as he could get from the native Englishman, or else to charge himself with a double freight, and with port dues and other expenses for entry and clearance in England. From thus compelling the colonists to sell in England, the next step was to compel them to buy from that country, which was done by another law forbidding importations into the colonies of "any commodity of the growth, production, or manufacture of Europe," except from "England, Wales, or Berwick-upon-Tweed," and in vessels built in England. To a strict execution of these laws the colonial governors were bound by their official oath, and the local revenue officers appointed in England for the colonies had all the same powers as in the parent country. The cupidity of the landholder was stimulated by that of the merchant. An apprehension arose that the industry of the colonial grazier and weaver would "sink the value of English land,” and an Act of Parliament in one of the last years of King William forbade the loading "in any ship or vessel," or "upon any horse, cart, or other carriage," of "any wool, or manufacture made or mixed with wool, being the produce or manufacture of any of the English plantations in America," to be conveyed "to any other of the said plantations, or to any other place whatsoever."

1699.