Nor was this any inconsiderable or puny element which Lord North had deliberately forced into revolt. Massachusetts alone had at the outbreak of the Revolution five hundred fishing vessels, and the town of Marblehead one hundred and fifty sea-going fishing schooners. Gloucester had nearly as many, and all along the coast, from Maine to New York, there were thrifty settlers, farmers and fishermen, by turns, as the season served. New England was preeminently a maritime state. Its people had early discovered that a livelihood could more easily be plucked from the green surges of ocean, white-capped as they sometimes were, than wrested from the green and boulder-crowned hills. Upon the fisheries rested practically all the foreign commerce. They were the foundation upon which were built the superstructure of comfort and even luxury, the evidences of which are impressive even in the richer New England of to-day. Therefore, when the British ministry attacked this calling, it roused against the crown not merely the fisherman and the sailor, but the merchants as well--not only the denizens of the stuffy forecastles of pinks and schooners, but the owners of the fair great houses in Boston and New Bedford. Lord North's edicts stopped some thousands of sturdy sailors from catching cod and selling them to foreign peoples. They accordingly became privateers, and preyed upon British commerce until it became easier for a mackerel to slip through the meshes of a seine than for a British ship to make its usual voyages. The edicts touched the commercial Bostonians in their pockets, and stimulated them to give to the Revolution that countenance and support of the "business classes" which revolutionary movements are apt to lack, and lacking which, are apt to fail.