of ocean, white-capped as they sometimes were, than wrested from the green and boulder-crowned hills.  Upon the fisheries rested practically all the foreign commerce.  They were the foundation upon which were built the superstructure of comfort and even luxury, the evidences of which are impressive even in the richer New England of to-day.  Therefore, when the British ministry attacked this calling, it roused against the crown not merely the fisherman and the sailor, but the merchants as well—­not only the denizens of the stuffy forecastles of pinks and schooners, but the owners of the fair great houses in Boston and New Bedford.  Lord North’s edicts stopped some thousands of sturdy sailors from catching cod and selling them to foreign peoples.  They accordingly became privateers, and preyed upon British commerce until it became easier for a mackerel to slip through the meshes of a seine than for a British ship to make its usual voyages.  The edicts touched the commercial Bostonians in their pockets, and stimulated them to give to the Revolution that countenance and support of the “business classes” which revolutionary movements are apt to lack, and lacking which, are apt to fail.

The war, of course, left the fisheries crippled and almost destroyed.  It had been a struggle between the greatest naval power of the world, and a loose coalition of independent colonies, without a navy and without a centralized power to build and maintain one.  Massachusetts did, indeed, equip an armed ship to protect her fishermen, but partly because the protection was inadequate, and partly as a result of the superior attractions of privateering, the fishing boats were gradually laid up, until scarcely enough remained in commission to supply the demands of the home merchant for fish.  Where there had been prosperity and bustle about wharves, and fish-houses, there succeeded idleness and squalor.  Shipbuilding was prostrate, commerce was dead.  The sailors returned to the farms, shipped on the privateers, or went into Washington’s army.  But when peace was declared, they flocked to their boats, and began to rebuild their shattered industry.  Marblehead, which went into the war with 12,000 tons of shipping, came out with 1500.  Her able-bodied male citizens had decreased in numbers from 1200 to 500.  Six hundred of her sons, used to hauling the seine and baiting the trawl, were in British prisons.  How many from this and other fishing ports were pressed against their will into service on British men-of-war, history has no figures to show; but there were hundreds.  Yet, prostrate as the industry was, it quickly revived, and soon again attained those noble proportions that had enabled Edmund Burke to say of it, in defending the colonies before the House of Commons: 

“No ocean but what is vexed with their fisheries; no climate that is not witness of their toils.  Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dextrous and firm sagacity of English enterprise ever carried this perilous mode of hardy enterprise to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people—­a people who are still, as it were, in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.”