Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/347

 THE PRE-REVOLUTION ERA 335 For a considerable interval Europe had rest from wars on any large scale. But during the next twenty years Great Britain became involved in a quarrel which brought about 6 American an event of first-rate importance in the world's Independ- history, the birth of the independent nation ence * called the United States of America. The British colonies had not been treated like those of Spain, as The estates of the Crown. They had been left for the Colonial most part to manage their own affairs, though System « with more interference from their governors, whom they did not choose for themselves, than the Crown was able to exercise in England. But they had to submit to trade regulations imposed by the English and later by the British parliament, which benefited the Mother Country at the expense of the colonies. These they had endured, not without protest and occasionally even active resistance; partly because the authorities winked at evasions, and partly because of the protection afforded to them against their French rivals by British forces. This protection they could not afford to dis- pense with so long as the French in Canada could appeal to France for support against them. But now there was nothing to fear from the French nation, and the French colonists in Canada had become British subjects by the treaty of Paris. Also the British The government, anxious to retrench and to make up Quarrel, for the great expenditure on the war, demanded 1765, a very strict enforcement of the irritating trade regulations. This might have been endured, since the imposition of customs for the regulation of trade in the interests of British commerce had always been recognised as something quite different from taxation of which the object was to raise revenue. But when the British government proceeded to impose fresh taxes of a trivial but irritating character, with the avowed object not of regulating trade but of raising revenue, the colonists caught at the opportunity of protesting that the funda- mental principle of the British Constitution was set at nought. For the Declaration of Right, the instrument under which the succession to the English Crown had been changed in 1688,