With singularly little debate, honorable and right honorable
members were ready to vote this new Sugar Act, having the
minister's word for it that it would be enforced, the revenue
thereby much improved, and a sudden stop put to the
long-established illicit traffic with the foreign islands, a
traffic so beneficial to the northern colonies, so prejudicial to
the Empire and the pockets of planters. Thus it was that Mr.
Grenville came opportunely to the aid of the Spanish
authorities, who for many years had employed their guarda costas
in a vain effort to suppress this very traffic, conceiving it,
oddly enough, to be injurious to Spain and highly advantageous
to Britain.

It may be that the Spanish authorities regarded the West Indian
trade as a commercial system rather than as a means of revenue.
This aspect of the matter, the commercial effects of his
measures, Mr. Grenville at all events managed not to take
suffciently into account, which was rather odd, seeing that he
professed to hold the commercial system embodied in the
Navigation and Trade Acts in such high esteem, as a kind of
"English Palladium." No one could have wished less than Grenville
to lay sacrilegious hands on this Palladium, have less intended
to throw sand into the nicely adjusted bearings of the Empire's
smoothly working commercial system. If he managed nevertheless to
do something of this sort, it was doubtless by virtue of being
such a "good man of business," by virtue of viewing the art of
government too narrowly as a question of revenue only. For the
moment, preoccupied as they were with the quest of revenue, the
new measures seemed to Mr. Grenville and to the squires and
planters who voted them well adapted to raising a moderate sum,