Doubtless Kieft honestly endeavored to correct the evils which had grown up under his predecessor’s rule; but his motives were probably not always of a purely moral character. In forbidding the retailing of wine and confining its sale to the Company’s warehouse—“where,” as he stated in his proclamation, “it could be obtained in moderate quantities and at a fair price”—he intended no doubt to create for himself a monopoly of this traffic; and in establishing a distillery on Staten Island, the first in New Netherland, he very likely sought to enlarge the scope of his monopoly. Fortunately, brewing had by this time grown too strong as an independent enterprise to be absorbed by the Company in this singularly arbitrary manner. It had become a favorite occupation, as a local historian justly says; and many of the best and most respected citizens engaged in it. [2] The old German night-watchman’s hourly song began with the announcement of the hour of the night and the admonition to guard fire and light. [Sidenote: BREWERS REVOLT AGAINST A TAX] Naturally enough, the rapid growth of brewing suggested to Governor Kieft the expediency of levying a tax upon beer, and he imposed this all the more readily because, in consequence of the Indian War which he had provoked by a “shocking massacre of savages,” the treasury was totally depleted. In 1644, he levied a tax of three guilders upon every tun of beer manufactured by a brewer, and of one florin upon every tun brewed by private citizens for their own use. Aware that the imposition of this or any other tax without the consent of the “Eight Men”—a sort of assembly representing the people—would meet with little favor, he endeavored to propitiate the brewers by permitting them to sell beer to tapsters at twenty florins per tun, an increase over the old price almost covering the amount of the tax. The brewers, nevertheless, stoutly refused to pay the excise, and based their refusal upon the ground that the tax was imposed against the will of the representatives of the people and, therefore, contrary to what they conceived to be an inalienable right of every burgher. While their opposition to a government without the consent of the governed may not have been very clearly defined, the stout burghers of the colony fully understood that taxation without the consent of the taxed was an absolute wrong.