sensitive provincial minds the memory of bygone parliamentary
battles, was an ever-present stimulus to the eternal vigilance
which was well known to be the price of liberty.

And so, throughout the eighteenth century, little colonial
aristocracies played their part, in imagination clothing their
governors in the decaying vesture of old-world tyrants and
themselves assuming the homespun garb, half Roman and half
Puritan, of a virtuous republicanism. Small matters were thus
stamped with great character. To debate a point of procedure in
the Boston or Williamsburg assembly was not, to be sure, as high
a privilege as to obstruct legislation in Westminster; but men of
the best American families, fashioning their minds as well as
their houses on good English models, thought of themselves, in
withholding a governor's salary or limiting his executive power,
as but reenacting on a lesser stage the great parliamentary
struggles of the seventeenth century. It was the illusion of
sharing in great events rather than any low mercenary motive that
made Americans guard with jealous care their legislative
independence; a certain hypersensitiveness in matters of taxation
they knew to be the virtue of men standing for liberties which
Englishmen had once won and might lose before they were aware.

As a matter of course, therefore, the colonial assemblies
protested against the measures of Grenville. The General Court of
Massachusetts instructed its agent to say that the Sugar Act
would ruin the New England fisheries upon which the industrial
prosperity of the northern colonies depended. What they would
lose was set down with some care, in precise figures: the fishing
trade, "estimated at 164,000 pounds per annum; the vessels