The Rockinghams carried the Repeal of the Stamp Act; but the effect of this wise and generous policy was marred by a Declaratory Act for better securing the dependence of His Majesty’s dominions in America, which set forth the supremacy of Parliament over all the colonies and its right to impose taxes. At the end of July, after the conclusion of a satisfactory session, the Marquis of Rockingham was suddenly, to the surprise of the nation, ejected from office by the king, and a new ministry of strangely assorted talents, with Chatham at its head, in which Shelburne, Charles Townshend, the Duke of Grafton, and Camden were the leading figures, was pushed into office. Accordingly when Adam Smith returned to England he found not only that those commercial, fiscal, and colonial questions in which he was so deeply versed were the first questions in politics, but also that the two statesmen with whom he was most intimate occupied two of the most important posts—for Charles Townshend was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Shelburne was a Secretary of State. These events sufficiently explain why a real statesman like Shelburne, one of the leading members of the ministry, was seeking information at the beginning of the session of 1767 upon colonial topics. It seems astonishing to us now that the Roman analogy should have so exercised the minds of practical statesmen; but Greek and Latin were the only subjects in those days with which educated members of the governing classes were sure to be familiar, and it was to these men in Parliament that political arguments were exclusively addressed. Probably Shelburne wanted classical precedents to check his colleagues from reverting to a coercive policy, and was anxious to meet the argument from Rome that had been used in the debates of the previous year. At any rate, he had asked help of Adam Smith, and received the following reply, which was more helpful than it should have been: “Within these two days I have looked over everything I can find relating to the Roman colonys. I have not yet found anything of much consequence.... They seem to have been very independent. Of thirty colonys of whom the Romans demanded troops in the second Carthaginian War, twelve refused to obey. They frequently rebelled and joined the enemies of the republic; being in some measure little independent republics, they naturally followed the interests which their peculiar situation pointed out to them.” His first studies on Roman colonisation had a decidedly whiggish complexion. Further reading led him to the juster view expressed in the _Wealth of Nations_, that a Roman colony was quite different from the autonomous Greek ἀποικία, “at best a sort of corporation, which, though it had the power of enacting byelaws for its own government, was at all times subject to the correction, jurisdiction, and legislative authority of the mother country.” And this explains why the Greek colonies were so much more