In 1751 Parliament passed an act regulating in the New England colonies the issue of paper money and preventing them "from adding a legal tender clause thereto"; in 1764 Parliament forbade issue of legal tender money in any of the colonies. As a member of the Pennsylvania assembly, Franklin had successfully sponsored issues of paper money; in London, following the 1764 act, he urged that one of the causes breeding disrespect for Parliament was "the prohibition of making paper money among [us]."[i-205] Economics blends into politics when we remember that the 1764 restraining legislation was "one of the factors in the subsequent separation, for it caused some of the suffering that inevitably follows in the wake of an unsound monetary policy whose onward course is suddenly checked."[i-206] In 1766 Franklin was yet an ardent imperialist, who sought politically and economically to keep whole "that fine and noble China Vase, the British Empire." His _Remarks and Facts Concerning American Paper Money_ (1767), in answer to Lord Hillsborough's Board of Trade report circulated among British merchants, is an ardent plea for legal tender paper money. He argued that British merchants (since yearly trade balances had regularly been in their favor) had not been deprived of gold and silver, that paper money _had worked_ in the Colonies,[i-207] and that British merchants had lost no more in their colonial dealings than was inevitable in war times. Franklin concluded that since there were no mines in the colonies, paper money was a necessity (arguing here very shrewdly that even English silver "is obliged to the legal Tender for Part of its Value"). Hence, at least for colonies deserving it, the mother country should take off the restraint on legal tender. What Franklin seems not to have known and what the merchants had actually felt (they had their accounts staring at them) was that in the past, especially after 1750, much of the legal tender was in effect nothing but inconvertible fiat money. Mr. Carey quotes from an uncollected item, Franklin's "The Legal Tender of Paper Money in America," in which he threatened that "if the colonies were not allowed to issue legal-tender notes there was no way in which they could retain hard money except by boycotting English goods."[i-208] Franklin suggested (to S. Cooper, April 22, 1779) that depreciation may not be unmixed evil, since it may be viewed as a tax: "It should always be remembered, that the original Intention was to sink the Bills by Taxes, which would as effectually extinguish the Debt as an actual Redemption."[i-209] Not a little Machiavellian for one who was not blind to the sanctity of contracts!