Indeed, the English king seemed to think almost anybody would do for governor who contrived to wring money enough out of his distant subjects. Many of the royal governors were self-conceited, arrogant, and tyrannical. Consequently in some of the colonies there was almost incessant quarreling between the governors and the people. By and by the colonies came to be treated, not as a part of the home country, but as a sort of foreign district to furnish a royal revenue. =134. The Colonies begin to prosper.=--Notwithstanding all their hardships, the colonies prospered. The people were wonderfully enterprising. They built ships and made a great deal of money by trading with the West Indies, France, Spain, and other countries. The New Englanders alone had over five hundred vessels engaged in domestic and foreign commerce and in profitable fisheries. The early colonists were ingenious. They built and ran a sawmill a hundred years before one was erected in England. They exported great quantities of excellent lumber. They began very early to manufacture farmer's tools, leather, boots and shoes, woolen cloth, hats, glass, paper, salt, and gunpowder. The sale of these goods and of many other things produced by them made a profitable trade. In return the colonists bought in distant lands a great amount and variety of other merchandise. =135. The British Government begins its Tyrannical Policy.=--But the English rulers, seeing all this prosperity, became jealous and said: "This will never do! We must stop it! Those distant colonists across the ocean are driving a great trade; the foreign nations they deal with get their money. We must have it; we must compel them to do all their trading with us." And that is what the English government tried to do. By 1750 not less than twenty-nine Acts of Parliament had been passed with the intent to have all of the loss in trade fall on the colonies and all the gain come to England. In 1761 it was decided to enforce the so-called Navigation Acts, forbidding the colonies to have any foreign commerce except in British ships. Our colonial merchants were not allowed to export goods, nor to import any except from England or her colonies. They must not import any sugar or molasses without paying on it a heavy duty, which went to the king. Under these unjust laws the British traders could fix low prices on all they bought, and high prices on all they sold, and thus by this double-edged method could shape their profits to suit themselves. =136. Other Absurd and Tyrannical Laws.=--Still more odious than these navigation laws were other absurd and tyrannical regulations made to cripple the industries and manufactures of the colonies. The fact was, the English Parliament meant that England's workshops should do all the manufacturing, her merchants all the trading, and her ships all the carrying for the colonies, that they might keep in England all the immense profits of the colonial trade.