The war pressed so heavily on the commercial interests of the community that it was found necessary to lay a tonnage duty of a shilling a ton upon the vessels over ten tons burthen of other colonies that broke bulk in Newport harbor. The payment might be made in money or in powder, at the rate of a shilling a pound, and the products of the duty were employed in keeping up a powder magazine on the island. Rhode Islanders had not yet learnt to pay their taxes promptly, and more than once the Assembly was called together to devise the means of collecting sums already voted. The tonnage duty was a welcome, though a small contribution, to the scanty resources of the little Colony. A few years later a new source was opened by the levy of a duty upon foreign wines, liquors and molasses--that upon molasses being a half-penny a gallon. In the August session of 1698 an elaborate tax law in twelve sections was enacted, and a tax of eight hundred pounds currency was voted. By this act a poll tax of a shilling a head was imposed upon all males between sixteen and sixty. But this, also, was not easily collected, and years passed before an adequate method of taxation was devised and applied. Shortly after the return to the charter the small-pox broke out. "Rhode Island is almost destroyed by the small-pox," says a cotemporary letter. When the Assembly met they were unable to open the session with the prescribed formalities, for the only copy of the charter was in the keeping of the recorder, who was sick with the dreaded disease, and the reading of the charter was the first step towards organization. When the pestilence was passed, the attention of legislation was directed to the militia laws, which were revised and brought more into harmony with the material wants of the Colony. In this connection it may not be out of place to remember that the town house was enlarged and a belfry added to it. Government was gradually putting on the external forms of authority. In 1691 a change occurred on the eastern border which threatened her inter-colonial relations. Plymouth was merged in Massachusetts, which was thus brought into larger contact with Rhode Island. Sir William Phipps, a native of Massachusetts, was appointed Governor, with a commission which gave him command over all the forces of New England, by land and by sea--a flagrant violation of the charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut, and which was vigorously repelled. Older grievances were not entirely healed. Some Pawcatuck men asked to be placed under the laws of Connecticut. The leaven of the Atherton company dispute had not yet spent its force. But the change of tone in the language of the correspondence shows that the bitterness which had distinguished its early stages was gradually passing away.