fishermen might be created claiming English ports for their home.  At first the effort was made to prohibit the colonies from exporting fish.  The great Roman Catholic countries of France, Spain, and Portugal took by far the greater share of the fish sent out, though the poorer qualities were shipped to the West Indies and there exchanged for sugar and molasses.  Against this trade Lord North leveled some of his most offensive measures, proposing bills, indeed, so unjust and tyrannical that outcries were raised against them even in the British House of Lords.  To cut off intercourse with the foreign peoples who took the fish of the Yankees by hundreds and thousands of quintals, and gave in return rum, molasses, and bills of exchange on England, to destroy the calling in which every little New England seacoast village was interested above all things, Lord North first proposed to prohibit the colonies trading in fish with any country save the “mother” country, and secondly, to refuse to the people of New England the right to fish on the Great Banks of Newfoundland, thus confining them to the off-shore banks, which already began to show signs of being fished out.  Even a hostile parliament was shocked by these measures.  Every witness who appeared before the House of Commons testified that they would work irreparable injury to New England, would rob six thousand of her able-bodied men of their means of livelihood, and would drive ten thousand more into other vocations.  But the power of the ministry forced the bills through, though twenty-one peers joined in a solemn protest.  “We dissent,” said they, “because the attempt to coerce, by famine, the whole body of the inhabitants of great and populous provinces, is without example in the history of this, or, perhaps, of any civilized nations.”  This was in 1775, and the revolution in America had already begun.  It was the policy of Lord North to force the colonists to stop their opposition to unjust and offensive laws by imposing upon them other laws more unjust and more offensive still—­a sort of homeopathic treatment, not infrequently applied by tyrants, but which seldom proves effective.  In this case it aligned the New England fishermen to a man with the Revolutionists.  A Tory fisherman would have fared as hard as

    “Old Floyd Ireson for his hard heart
    Tarr’d and feathered and carried in a cart,
    By the woman of Marblehead.”

Nor was this any inconsiderable or puny element which Lord North had deliberately forced into revolt.  Massachusetts alone had at the outbreak of the Revolution five hundred fishing vessels, and the town of Marblehead one hundred and fifty sea-going fishing schooners.  Gloucester had nearly as many, and all along the coast, from Maine to New York, there were thrifty settlers, farmers and fishermen, by turns, as the season served.  New England was preeminently a maritime state.  Its people had early discovered that a livelihood could more easily be plucked from the green surges