It would therefore appear to be admitted by this gentleman that the primary object of the King in the selection of Bellamont was to secure the more rigorous enforcement of the Navigation and Plantation Acts. These Acts had been passed in the reign of Charles the Second, for the purpose of securing for England the monopoly of American trade, by preventing under heavy penalties any direct trade between the Colonists and their neighbors, French, Spanish, or Dutch, in the West Indies. They prohibited the import and export of goods into or from the plantations except in ships built in England; and provided for the seizure and forfeiture of any other vessels employed in that trade and all goods found on board. It will readily be understood that, although this monopoly was regarded with great favour in England, it had been growing more and more unpopular with the Colonists, as their commerce and population increased, because their traffic with their neighbors was incommoded and hampered by it; the inevitable result being that the smuggling of goods into and out of the plantations had become a popular and lucrative and not very difficult business. Our Dutch King’s desire to check this smuggling was not unnatural, money being at that time urgently required by him for the prosecution of his French War. Bellamont, appointed Governor of New England in July, 1695, seems to have been in no hurry to go out to America. The primary object of his appointment being the more rigid enforcement of the Navigation Acts, it may be that it was thought desirable that he should be at hand during the passage through Parliament in the following year of the English Statute entitled “An Act for preventing frauds and regulating abuses in the Plantation Trade.” The Parliamentary draftsmen of those days had a pretty talent for invective exercisable on the instructions of those in power. In this case it was displayed not only in the preamble of the Act, but also in the recitals to several of the clauses. From these we learn that notwithstanding the Acts of King Charles the Second “made for the encouragement of the navigation of the kingdom and for the better securing and regulating the plantation trade, great abuses were daily committed to the detriment of the English navigation and the loss of a great part of the plantation trade, through the artifice and cunning of ill-disposed persons.” Amongst these artful, cunning, and ill-disposed persons, the pre-eminence is assigned to Scotchmen, who in that year were in bad odour with the King, and projecting their unfortunate Darien expedition which, had it succeeded, might have hit the English trade far harder than any amount of smuggling could have done: “Great frauds and abuses,” we are told by the draftsman, “have been committed by Scotchmen and others in the plantation trade, by obtruding false and counterfeit certificates upon the government officers of having given security