The home government, moreover, though it diligently imposed restrictions, was by no means as diligent in enforcing them. An ill-advised statute of 1733 laid prohibitory duties on the importation of sugar, molasses, and rum out of the French West Indies, in the hope that the sales of sugar and molasses in the islands owned by England might be increased. To enforce the act would have been to hazard the utter commercial ruin of New England. Out of the cheap molasses of the French islands she made the rum which was a chief source of her wealth,—the rum with which she bought slaves for Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and paid her balances to the English merchants. But no serious attempt was made to enforce it. Customs officers and merchants agreed in ignoring it, and officers of the crown shut their eyes to the trade which it forbade. Smuggling upon that long coast was a simple matter, and even at the chief ports only a little circumspection was needed about cargoes out of the Indies. Moreover, the men who governed in England contented themselves with general restrictions and did not go on to manage the very lives of the colonists in the colonies themselves. That was what the French did. They built their colonies up by royal order; sent emigrants out as they sent troops, at the King’s expense and by the King’s direction; could get only men to go, therefore, for the most part, and very few women or families. For the English there was nothing of the sort, after the first. Rich men or great mercantile companies might help emigrants with money or supplies or free gifts of land in order to fill up the colonies which the crown had given them the right to establish and govern; but only those went out who volunteered. Emigrants went, moreover, in families, after the first years were passed and the colonies fairly started, if not at the very outset of the enterprise,—in associated groups, congregations, and small volunteer communities. When they reached the appointed place of settlement they were left to shift for themselves, as they had expected, exactly as they would have been at home; and they insisted upon having the same rights and freedom they would have had there. They were making homes, without assistance or favor, and for their own use and benefit.