abuses.  The contraband will always keep pace in some measure with the fair trade.  It should stand as a fundamental maxim, that no vulgar precaution ought to be employed in the cure of evils which are closely connected with the cause of our prosperity.  Perhaps this great person turned his eyes somewhat less than was just towards the incredible increase of the fair trade, and looked with something of too exquisite a jealousy towards the contraband.  He certainly felt a singular degree of anxiety on the subject, and even began to act from that passion earlier than is commonly imagined.  For whilst he was First Lord of the Admiralty, though not strictly called upon in his official line, he presented a very strong memorial to the Lords of the Treasury, (my Lord Bute was then at the head of the board,) heavily complaining of the growth of the illicit commerce in America.  Some mischief happened even at that time from this over-earnest zeal.  Much greater happened afterwards, when it operated with greater power in the highest department of the finances.  The bonds of the Act of Navigation were straitened so much that America was on the point of having no trade, either contraband or legitimate.  They found, under the construction and execution then used, the act no longer tying, but actually strangling them.  All this coming with new enumerations of commodities, with regulations which in a manner put a stop to the mutual coasting intercourse of the colonies, with the appointment of courts of admiralty under various improper circumstances, with a sudden extinction of the paper currencies, with a compulsory provision for the quartering of soldiers,—­the people of America thought themselves proceeded against as delinquents, or, at best, as people under suspicion of delinquency, and in such a manner as they imagined their recent services in the war did not at all merit.  Any of these innumerable regulations, perhaps, would not have alarmed alone; some might be thought reasonable; the multitude struck them with terror.

But the grand manoeuvre in that business of new regulating the colonies was the fifteenth act of the fourth of George the Third, which, besides containing several of the matters to which I have just alluded, opened a new principle.  And here properly began the second period of the policy of this country with regard to the colonies, by which the scheme of a regular plantation Parliamentary revenue was adopted in theory and settled in practice:  a revenue not substituted in the place of, but superadded to, a monopoly; which monopoly was enforced at the same time with additional strictness, and the execution put into military hands.