Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/98

 66 Questions of taxation. [noo- the grant must be made at the beginning of the session, so that the governor might retain some measure of independence. There were citizens of Massachusetts engaged in that dispute who lived to fight the battle of the Stamp Act and the Tea Tax; and we cannot doubt that the feebleness of the British government in abandoning a claim so strongly and so persistently asserted was not forgotten by them. It should be noticed too that the Assembly was fighting not against an immediate practical grievance which bore hard on individual citizens, but against a system the evils of which were dormant and potential rather than actual. Massachusetts was not the only colony in which the question of taxation gave rise to conflict. In Virginia, Governor Dinwiddie claimed in 1753 the right to levy a fee fixed by himself on all documents that required the use of the public seal. The Assembly protested and petitioned the King. The petition was rejected; but it appears from Dinwiddie's letter that the attitude of the Assembly led him to modify his demands. In Pennsylvania a financial dispute raged between the Assembly and the Proprietors. The latter claimed that their lands, of which large tracts were unoccupied and unremunerative, should not be rated on the same terms as the rest of the colony. The Assembly denied the claim to such exemption, and in retaliation refused to levy money for public purposes till the claim was withdrawn, notwithstanding that funds were urgently needed to protect the colony against Indian and French invaders. It will be noticed that all these disputes were concerned with financial matters, and that two of them turned on the broad general question, the right of the colonists to tax themselves. The inevitable result was to give to the colonial conception of liberty a certain practical definite- ness and hardness, to divest it of sentiment, and to teach men to fight for it in a technical lawyer-like temper. When Burke said that taxation had been always the battlefield on which the fight for English liberty was waged, he might have gone further and said that, of all Englishmen, this was most peculiarly applicable to the American colonists. Other influences had been at work to make them look with suspicion and apprehension on the financial claims of the British government. Though the hardships of the restraint imposed by the mother-country on the commerce and industry of the colonies have often been grossly exaggerated, yet it cannot be doubted that they were enough to create friction and to beget a sense of grievance. The commercial legislation affecting the trade of the colonies falls under two heads the Acts con- trolling exportation and importation, and those controlling production. Of the latter we have already spoken. It will probably be convenient to make a clear enumeration of what the former actually were. By an Act of 1660 certain enumerated commodities, being all the chief products of the colonies, could be landed only in British ports. Two later Acts