enactment was most unfortunate at a time when the influential classes in New England were deeply irritated at the enforcement of a policy which was to stop the illicit trade from which they had so largely profited in the past.  The popular indignation, however, vented itself against the stamp act, which imposed internal taxation, was declared to be in direct violation of the principles of political liberty and self-government long enjoyed by the colonists as British subjects, and was repealed as a result of the violent opposition it met in the colonies.  Parliament contented itself with a statutory declaration of its supremacy in all matters over every part of the empire; but not long afterwards the determination of some English statesmen to bring the colonies as far as practicable directly under the dominion of British law in all matters of commerce and taxation, and to control their government as far as possible, found full expression in the Townshend acts of 1767 which imposed port duties on a few commodities, including tea, imported into those countries.  At the same time provision was made for the due execution of existing laws relating to trade.  The province of New York was punished for openly refusing to obey an act of parliament which required the authorities to furnish the British troops with the necessaries of life.  Writs of assistance, which allowed officials to search everywhere for smuggled goods, were duly legalised.  These writs were the logical sequence of a rigid enforcement of the laws of trade and navigation, and had been vehemently denounced by James Otis, so far back as 1761, as not only irreconcilable with the colonial charters, but as inconsistent with those natural rights which a people “derived from nature and the Author of nature”—­an assertion which obtained great prominence for the speaker.  This bold expression of opinion in Massachusetts should be studied by the historian of those times in connection with the equally emphatic revolutionary argument advanced by Patrick Henry of Virginia, two years later, against the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Anglican clergy and the right of the king to veto legislation of the colony.  Though the prerogative of the crown was thus directly called into question in a Virginia court, the British government did not take a determined stand on the undoubted rights of the crown in the case.  English statesmen and lawyers probably regarded such arguments, if they paid any attention to them at all in days when they neglected colonial opinion, as only temporary ebullitions of local feeling, though in reality they were so many evidences of the opposition that was sure to show itself whenever there was a direct interference with the privileges and rights of self-governing communities.  Both Henry and Otis touched a key-note of the revolution, which was stimulated by the revenue and stamp acts and later measures affecting the colonies.