Europe, the chief market in any case for the Virginian leaf. Grumbling and evasion disappeared in good time, and Virginia accommodated herself with reasonable grace to what was, after all, no ruinous or unprofitable arrangement. New England, where traders most abounded, found little in the acts that she need complain of or seek to escape from. No New England commodity had its route and market prescribed as Virginian tobacco had; New England ships were “English” bottoms no less than ships built in England itself; they could be built as cheaply as the Dutch, and the long coast of the continent was clear for their skippers. If laws grew inconvenient, there were unwatched harbors enough in which to lade and unlade without clearance papers. English capital quickened trade as well as supplied shipping for the ocean carriage, and the King’s navy made coast and sea safe. If it was irritating to be tied to the leading-strings of statutes, it was at least an agreeable thing that they should usually pull in the direction merchants would in any case have taken. Though all products of foreign countries had to be brought through the English markets and the hands of English middlemen, the duties charged upon them upon their entrance into England were remitted upon their reshipment to America, and they were often to be had more cheaply in the colonies than in London. [Illustration: MOALE’S SKETCH OF BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, IN 1752] In 1699, when the war was over, Parliament laid a new restriction upon the colonies, forbidding them to manufacture their own wool for export, even for export from colony to colony. Good housewives were not to be prevented from weaving their own wool into cloth for the use of their own households; village weavers were not to be forbidden their neighborhood trade; but the woollen weavers of England supplied more than half of all the exports to the colonies, and had no mind to let woollen manufacture spring up in America if Parliament could be induced to prohibit it. It made no great practical difference to the colonies, though it bred a bitter thought here and there. Manufactures were not likely to spring up in America. “No man who can have a piece of land of his own, sufficient by his labor to subsist his family in plenty,” said Mr. Franklin long afterwards, “is poor enough to be a manufacturer and work for a master. Hence, while there is land enough in America for our people, there can be no manufactures to any amount or value.” But the woollen manufacturers in England meant to take no chances in the matter; and the colonists did no more than grumble upon occasion at the restraints of a law which they had no serious thought of breaking.