These annoyances were but pin-pricks, compared with many restrictions placed upon their trade. There were laws ordaining that all trade between the colonies should be carried in ships built in England or the colonies, and forbidding the exportation of tobacco, sugar, cotton, wool, and other articles except to England and her other colonies, as well as a host of minor regulations, such as that in the woods of Maine no tree with a diameter greater than two feet at a foot above ground should be cut down, except to make a mast for a ship of the royal navy. It is true that on the other hand no Englishman might buy tobacco that was not grown in America or Bermuda, that the export trade to the motherland was encouraged by bounties, and that owing to a system by which duties were remitted on exportation to America they could purchase continental goods more cheaply than they could be obtained in England[12]; but these compensations did not make amends, in the colonists' eyes, for the regulations that cramped their trade. [12] William Hunt: _Political History of England, 1760-1801_. These restrictions were much resented, and, as the volume of their commerce increased, might well have goaded the colonists into rebellion, had they not chosen the path of least resistance, and evaded them through the simple device of smuggling. The Sugar Act of 1733, designed in the interests of British merchants, forbidding the importation of sugar and molasses from the French West Indies except on payment of a prohibitive duty, aroused the ire of the Americans, who, realizing the uselessness of petitions,[13] only plunged still deeper into the contraband trade. This, in turn, angered those who had expected to benefit by the Act, and many protests to enforce the law were made to the home government, who turned a deaf ear to such representations until after the Peace of Paris, when Bute sent revenue cutters to cruise off the American coast. The officers of these ships were sworn to act as revenue officers and smuggling was somewhat checked at the cost of a vast deal of irritation at the summary methods of the sailors. [13] Petitions from Provincial Assemblies were ignored by ministers at home, and even memorials from such important states as Massachusetts and New York, ordered by the King in Council to be laid before Parliament, were suppressed.