The Navigation Acts, to which we have already adverted, which sought, contrary to all equity, right, or decency, to compel the poor fugitives from plenty and power to send away their scanty surplus of corn, and to get what few things they needed and could afford with difficulty to procure, oceanwise, and in vessels exclusively owned, built, manned, and officered in England, were standing grievances. They were so hard and stiff, that every one ran against them, and after picking himself up, looked back at them in very bad humor and with adjectives which in such moments some utter, but which types refuse to immortalize. Poor fowls breed rapidly. The Navigation Acts soon laid other vicious eggs. On the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles II., in 1660, the colonists were still further tied up by an act which restricted them in the disposition of their salable products to England alone,—a very desirable thing for English purchasers, but deemed by the pinched colonists rather rough upon them. The affectionate step-children, however, overlooked this selfishness of the cross-grained old step-mother, and clung with romantic attachment to the dear old homestead, from which they got nothing but cheap messages of cunning endearment, in return for the substantial contributions which were taken back in the Thames-built clippers. These acts of Parliament were of course floored with thick, wide planking of well-jointed terms, and roofed in with a royal signature, which in English, and especially in colonial eyes until opened, made even thin shingles shine like stars; but for all this parliamentary carpentering the gales and storms of real life soughed and swept in through the clapboarding, sometimes chilling, and sometimes wetting, the colonial tenants. Colonial lands, too, were given away as loosely and as liberally as by Congress now; then to royal, as now to railroad, favorites. A commercial strabismus, or English squint-eyedness, was sought to be made fashionable in the North American communities, just as now prevails in Canada,—an apparent look at their own interests in one direction, while in fact by this crooked optical inversion, the eye is all the time looking intently in quite another quarter. That direction was of course northeastwardly towards those little specks of islands, that were left, in the miscellaneous creation of things, near the outer rim of Europe, and so diminutive, that the very strain to discover them behind piles of parliamentary selfishness and supports, huge stacks of manufactured iron, steel, cotton, wool, and puffy conceits, was sure to injure the sight and at last to produce qualms and nausea.