If New England could no longer send her horses, cattle, lumber, casks, and fish to the French islands and the Spanish Main, and bring thence, in exchange for them, sugar and molasses, she must let her ships rot at the wharves and five thousand of her seamen go idle and starve; must seek elsewhere for a market for her chief products; could make no more rum with which to carry on her home trade in spirits or her traffic in slaves on the slave coast; must forego her profits at the southern ports, and go without the convenient bills drawn on exported Virginian tobacco wherewith she had been used to pay her debts to the London merchants. For thirty years and more it had been understood that the duties on that trade were not to be collected; but now, of a sudden, the law was to be carried out by armed vessels, writs of general search, and the summary proceedings of a court of admiralty. In 1764 Mr. Grenville had drawn the lines tighter than ever by a readjustment of duties. That meant ruin; and the Stamp Act was but the last touch of exasperation. The disposition of the ministers seemed all the more obvious because of the obnoxious “Quartering Act” which went along with the Stamp Act. They were authorized by Parliament to quarter troops in the colonies, and by special enactment the colonists were required to provide the troops with lodgings, firewood, bedding, drink, soap, and candles. [Illustration: STAMPS FORCED ON THE COLONIES] There were other causes of irritation which touched the colonists almost as nearly. In 1740 the Massachusetts assembly had set up a Land Bank authorized to issue notes based upon nothing but mortgages on land and personal bonds, with surety, given by those who subscribed to its support, and Parliament, at the solicitation of Boston men who knew what certain disaster such a bank would bring upon the business of the colony, had thrust in its hand and suppressed it. The scheme had been in great favor among the men of the country districts, and its suppression by direct act of Parliament had stirred them to a deep resentment. “The Act to destroy the Land Bank scheme,” John Adams declared, had “raised a greater ferment in the province than the Stamp Act did”; and it made the men who had resented it all the readier to take fire at the imposition of the stamp duties. The churches of the province had been deeply alarmed, too, by the effort of English churchmen to establish bishops in America, as if in preparation for a full Establishment; and the clergy were, almost to a man, suspicious of the government. The lumbermen of the forests felt the constant irritation of the crown’s claim to all their best sticks of timber for the royal navy, and were themselves fit fuel for agitation. Each class seemed to have its special reason for looking askance at everything that savored of control from over sea. The measures taken against the trade with the Indies were but the latest item in a growing account.