As long as France stayed in the American schoolhouse there were two big, full-grown bullies, whose mutual jealousy and antagonism were the best protection of the children from either; but after the overthrow of M. Jean Crapeau in 1763, Mr. Bull thought that he could have things just as he pleased, could sit down where he liked, in such gear as he chose to make himself comfortable in,—shirt-sleeves or hunting-coat, muddy or indecently short,—could eat up any one’s lunch if he fancied, and munch the choicest fruit that the youngsters were keeping for their own use at play-time. And so, by a law of bullyism,—which is human nature ossified by success,—the moment of the triumph over the one standing champion, was the moment when the intoxication of fancied supreme power, producing a vertigo of insolence, brought out around the object of the championship rivals never before suspected. In a word, by slow and painful training, the Colonies had become their own champions. The very year that saw the treaty of peace signed between France and England, by which the former gave up all her American possessions east of the Mississippi, and resigned the belt of North America to the latter, George Grenville, the English minister, gave notice that he should introduce into Parliament a bill to oblige every colonist, who used in any way receipts, notes, drafts, leases, deeds, mortgages, or any such crafty documents, to buy from the British government and put upon them stamps, the proceeds of which sale was to be spent, of course, not among the colonists themselves, but in England, in paying the national debt or in some other facetious way. Of course, Americans did not object to stamps in themselves, provided they helped to make or to hold the die which printed them, and had a hand in grooving and directing the channels in which the pay for them should flow. But they did object—and as the event proved most sanguinarily—to the slicing of their family loaf by a parliamentary knife called a stamp act, sharpened on a London stone, and whittling off their living even with the sparing charity of the Bull family. They did not think it either safe or right for any Taurian, or Teutonic, or Gallic chap, however gentlemanly in manners or benevolent in professions, to be trusted in the pantry, there to use to any extent what he might find, whether articles of luxury, as pies or other poisons, or necessities, as bread, butter, cider, or other field distillations.