The province--as yet, of course, excluding Plymouth with its twelve towns and five thousand inhabitants--contained at this time, 1660, about twenty-five thousand souls, living in fifty-two towns. These were nearly all on the coast; Dedham, Concord, Brookfield, Lancaster, Marlborough, and the Connecticut Valley hamlets of Springfield, Hadley, and Northampton being the most noteworthy exceptions. Though agriculture was the principal business, fishing was a staple industry, its product going to France, Spain, and the Straits. Pipe-staves, fir-boards, much material for ships, as masts, pitch and tar, also pork and beef, horses and corn, were shipped from this colony to Virginia, in return for tobacco and sugar either for home consumption or for export to England. Some iron was manufactured. The province enjoyed great prosperity. Boston stood forth as a lively and growing centre, and an English traveller about this time declared some of its merchants to be "damnable rich." As their most precious possession the colonists prized their liberties, which they claimed in virtue of their original patent. In a paper which it put forth on June 10, 1661, the General Court asserted for the colony the right to elect and empower its own officers, both high and low, to make its laws, to execute the same without appeal so long as they were not repugnant to those of England, and to defend itself by force and arms when necessary, against every infringement of its rights, even from acts of Parliament or of the king, if prejudicial to the country or contrary to just colonial legislation. In a word Massachusetts, even so early, regarded itself to all intents and purposes an independent State, and would have proclaimed accordingly had it felt sufficiently strong. [1664] Manifestly the king would not grant so much. On the occasion of his confirming the charter he demanded that the oath of allegiance be taken by the people of the colony; that justice be administered there in his name; and that the franchise be extended to all freemen of sufficient substance, with the liberty to use in worship, public and private, the forms of the English Church. The people obeyed but in part, for they would not even appear to admit the king's will to be their law. The franchise was slightly extended, in a grudging way, but no new religious privileges were at this time conceded. Unfortunately political and religious liberty were now in conflict. It was worse for the Baptists and Quakers that the king favored them, and the treatment which they received in the colony inclined them to the royalist side in the controversy.