while the people had been roused to a sharp sense of their situation, in view of the tyrannous attitude of England towards the Colonies, and the next step taken by the Crown, under Prime Minister Grenville, in threatening them with the no less hated Stamp Tax. This new fiscal infatuation on the part-of the English ministry strained the relations of the Colonies toward the Crown to almost the point of rupture. It was, moreover, an unwise exhibition of English stubbornness and impolicy, since it revealed the mistake which England fell into at the time of considering the Settlements of the New World as Colonial possessions to be held solely for the financial benefit of the mother country, rather than for their own advancement and material well-being. It is true, that the Seven Years' War, which had been waged chiefly for the protection of the American dependencies of the Crown, had left a heavy burden of debt upon England which she naturally looked to the Colonies in some measure to repay. But the Colonies had ready their argument-- they objected to being taxed without their consent, and without representation in the British Parliament, besides being, as they thought, sufficiently oppressed by the burden of customs' duties already imposed upon them. The spirit of resistance therefore grew, and was ere long to take a more determined and, to England, fatal form, for the Stamp Act, though later on repealed, was passed, in spite of the protests of the Colonial Assemblies and the increasing soreness of feeling in America against the mother country.