general search-warrants known as “writs of assistance.” The revenues raised by these duties were to be applied, as the stamp tax would have been had it been collected, to the support of the courts of justice and of the civil establishments of the several colonies, and to the expenses connected with their military defence. Evasions of the revenue acts were to be tried by the admiralty courts without juries. To the colonists this seemed simply a return to the policy of the Stamp Act. The tax was different, but the object was the same: to make their judges and their governors independent of them, and to compel them to pay for the maintenance of troops not of their own raising. These same ministers had suspended the legislative power of the New York assembly because it refused to make proper provision for the quartering of the King’s troops, as commanded by the act of 1765; and that assembly had felt itself obliged to yield and obey. Several companies of royal artillery had been sent to Boston in the autumn of 1766, and were quartered there at the colony’s expense by order of the governor and council. [Illustration: GEORGE WASHINGTON, 1772] The new taxes were laid upon trade, and they could not be attacked on the same grounds upon which the stamps had been objected to. But the trouble was that the new taxes, unlike the old restrictions, were to be enforced, evasion prevented. Mr. Townshend’s first act was to send commissioners to America specially charged and empowered to see to that. The ruinous acts of 1764 were to be carried out, and the West India trade, by which Boston merchants and ship owners lived, put a stop to. These were bitter things to endure. Some grounds must be found from which to fight them,—if not the arguments used against the Stamp Act, then others, if need be more radical. The ministers at home had set their far-away subjects to thinking with the eagerness and uneasiness of those who seek by some means to defend their liberties, and were fast making rebels of them.