This last provision had not been faithfully observed, and a considerable trade was going on illicitly between the British and the Spanish colonies. Britain, short of money by reason of the cost of the Seven Years' War, raised the import duties and enforced the prohibition against trading with the Spaniards. Certain of the expenses of the war had been incurred for the protection of the colonies, and though they might not welcome this action of the home Government they could not legally resist it. Nor did they. But then the king and his minister Grenville imposed, or sought to impose, on them a tax which surely was illegal and which surely they were within their rights in resisting. [Sidenote: The Stamp Act] It was imposed by the piece of legislation known as the Stamp Act, because its object was to levy money from the colonists by making it illegal for them to buy and sell certain articles within the colonies themselves unless they bore a government stamp; for which stamp payment had to be made to the home Government. It was a manifest breach of the agreement which had been made with the colonists, and the principal effect of the passing of this Stamp Act in 1765 was that the colonists called together a Congress of delegates from all the colonies and passed a protest against the Act and a demand for its repeal. More than that; when the ship came into Boston harbour carrying the first batch of the stamps to be used for the new tax, they had the stamps seized and retained. It was open defiance. It was defiance by something like three millions of determined people, the population having nearly doubled itself since the beginning of George III.'s reign. Pitt's generous comment upon it is well known: "Three millions of people so dead to all {140} feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest." It was chiefly Pitt's influence which led to the repeal of the Act in 1766; but much of the good effect of its repeal must have been spoiled by a measure called the "Declaratory Act," passed at the same time, declaring that the power of the British Parliament was supreme over the colonies "in all cases whatsoever." It was as much as to say, "We yield on this particular point, but we maintain that our right over you is despotic whensoever we think fit to exercise it." It did, in fact, claim to enslave, as Pitt indicated, these people, because, as we have seen all through the story, it was by insistence on the right to tax themselves that Britons had painfully won liberty: it was a right expressed in the words "no taxation without representation": and here was a declaration directly opposed to that right, for it declared that the home Government might tax the colonists, although they had no representation in the home Government!