One hundred years ago, on the tenth of February, 1763, a treaty of peace between England and France, as the leading powers, was signed at Paris.  This was no sooner arranged than the Ministry began that system of Colonial taxation which the Massachusetts House of Representatives denounced as tending to give the Crown and Ministers “an absolute and uncontrollable power of raising money upon the people, which by the wise Constitution of Great Britain is and can be only lodged with safety in the legislature.”  Part and parcel of this system was that comprehensive scheme of tyranny by means of which England attempted to secure the perpetual industrial dependence of the American Colonies, the principle of which we have already seen openly avowed in the Act of Parliament of 1663, a hundred years earlier.

It was her fixed policy, as is well known, to keep her skilled artisans at home, and to discourage as far as possible all manufactures in the Colonies.  By different statutes, passed in successive reigns, persons enticing artificers into foreign countries incur the penalty of five hundred pounds and twelve months’ imprisonment for the first offence, and of one thousand pounds and two years’ imprisonment for the second offence.  If the workmen did not return within six months after warning, they were to be deemed aliens, forfeit all their lands and goods, and be incapable of receiving any legacy or gift.  A similar penalty was laid so late as the reign of George III. upon any person contracting with or endeavoring to persuade any artificer concerned in printing calicoes, cottons, muslins, or linens, or preparing any tools for such manufacture, to go out of the kingdom.

The same jealousy of the Colonies, lest they should by their success in the different branches of industry interfere with the home monopoly, shows itself in various other forms.  There was, naturally enough, a special sensitiveness to the practice of the art of printing.  Sir Edmund Andros, when he came out as Governor of the Northern Colonies, was instructed “to allow of no printing-press”; and Lord Effingham, on his appointment to the government of Virginia, was directed “to allow no person to use a printing-press on any occasion whatever.”

The Board of Trade and Plantations made a report, in 1731, to the British Parliament concerning the “trades carried on, and manufactures set up, in the Colonies,” in which it is recommended that “some expedient be fallen upon to direct the thoughts of the Colonists from undertakings of this kind; so much the rather, because these manufactures in process of time may be carried on in a greater degree, unless an early stop be put to their progress.”

In one of Franklin’s papers, published in London in 1768, are enumerated some instances of the way in which the Colonists were actually interfered with by legislation.