cial classes at home. Conflict was therefore inevitable sooner or later. We have to trace briefly the chief events by which it was precipitated.

In 1760-61 England tried to enforce the navigation laws more strictly. Writs of assistance issued, empowering officers to enter any house at any time, to search for smuggled goods. This measure aroused a storm of indignation. The popular feeling was voiced, and at the same time intensified, by the action of James Otis, Jr., a young Boston lawyer, who threw up his position. as advocate-general rather than defend the hated writs, which he denounced as "instruments of slavery." "Then and there,” said John Adams, "the trumpet of the Revolution was sounded."

In May, 1764, a report reached Boston that a stamp act for the colonies had been proposed in Parliament, to raise revenue by forcing the use in America of stamped forms for all sorts of public papers, such as deeds, warrants, and the like. A feeling of mingled rage and alarm seized the

colonists. It seemed that a deliberate blow was about to be struck at their liberties. From the day of their founding the colonies had never been taxed directly except by their own legislatures. Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Virginia at once sent humble but earnest protests to Parliament against the proposed innovation.

The act was nevertheless passed in March of the next year, with almost no opposition. By its provisions, business documents were illegal and void unless written on the stamped paper. The cheapest stamp cost a shilling, the price ranging upward from that according to the importance of the document. The prepared paper had to be paid for in specie, a hardship indeed in a community where lawsuits were very common, and whose entire solid coin would not have sufficed to pay the revenue for a single year. Even bitterest Tories declared this requirement indefensible. Another flagrant feature of the act was the provision that violators