“Iron is to be found everywhere in America, and beaver are the natural produce of that country:  hats and nails and steel are wanted there as well as here.  It is of no importance to the common welfare of the empire whether a subject of the king gets his living by making hats on this or on that side of the water.  Yet the hatters of England have prevailed to obtain an act in their own favor restraining that manufacture in America, in order to oblige the Americans to send their beaver to England to be manufactured, and purchase back the hats, loaded with the charges of a double transportation.  In the same manner have a few nail-makers, and a still smaller body of steel-makers, (perhaps there are not half a dozen of these in England,) prevailed totally to forbid, by an Act of Parliament, the erecting of slitting-mills or steel-furnaces in America, that the Americans may be obliged to take all their nails for their buildings, and steel for their tools, from these artificers,” etc.

“It is an idle argument in the Americans,” said Governor Pownall, “when they talk of setting up manufactures for trade; but it would be equally injudicious in Government here to force any measure that may render the manufacturing for home consumption an object of prudence, or even of pique, in the Americans.”

The maternal Government pressed this matter a little too fast and too far.  The Colonists became piqued at last, and resolved, in 1764, not to purchase English stuffs for clothing, but to use articles of domestic manufacture as far as possible.  Boston, always a ringleader in these mischiefs, diminished her consumption of British merchandise ten thousand pounds and more in this one year.  The Harvard-College youth rivalled the neighboring town in their patriotic self-sacrifice, and the whole graduating class of 1770, with the names of Hutchinson, Saltonstall, and Winthrop at the head of the list, appeared at Commencement in black cloth of home-manufacture.  This act of defiance only illustrates more forcibly the almost complete dependence of Colonial industry at the time of its occurrence, the effect of a policy which looked upon the Colonies with no reference to any other consideration than the immediate profit to be derived from them.

In spite, however, of the hard measures employed by England to cripple the development of the Colonies in every direction, except such as might be profitable to herself, it was a very difficult matter to root out their affection for the mother-country.  Pownall, who was in this country from 1753 to 1761, successively Governor of Massachusetts, Lieutenant-Governor of New Jersey, and Governor of South Carolina, gives us the most ample testimony on this point.  His words are so strong that none can fail to be impressed with the picture he draws of a people who ten years later were in open revolt against the home authorities.