he exclaimed, "the same spirit of freedom which actuated that people at
first will accompany them still ... a people jealous of their liberties
and who will vindicate them, if ever they should be violated." The
answer of the ministry to a prophecy of force was a threat of force.
Preparations were accordingly made to dispatch a larger number of
soldiers than usual to the colonies, and the ink was hardly dry on the
Stamp Act when Parliament passed the Quartering Act ordering the
colonists to provide accommodations for the soldiers who were to enforce
the new laws. "We have the power to tax them," said one of the ministry,
"and we will tax them."


COLONIAL RESISTANCE FORCES REPEAL

=Popular Opposition.=--The Stamp Act was greeted in America by an
outburst of denunciation. The merchants of the seaboard cities took the
lead in making a dignified but unmistakable protest, agreeing not to
import British goods while the hated law stood upon the books. Lawyers,
some of them incensed at the heavy taxes on their operations and others
intimidated by patriots who refused to permit them to use stamped
papers, joined with the merchants. Aristocratic colonial Whigs, who had
long grumbled at the administration of royal governors, protested
against taxation without their consent, as the Whigs had done in old
England. There were Tories, however, in the colonies as in England--many
of them of the official class--who denounced the merchants, lawyers, and
Whig aristocrats as "seditious, factious and republican." Yet the
opposition to the Stamp Act and its accompanying measure, the Quartering
Act, grew steadily all through the summer of 1765.

In a little while it was taken up in the streets and along the