George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 7, 4th edition.

[91] was essential, it seemed a national benediction that

Chap. VII.} 1774. July.

a youthful king should intrust the task of amendment to a statesman, who preserved his purity of nature in a libertine age, and joined unquestioned probity to comprehensive intelligence and administrative experience.

The annual public expenses largely exceeded the revenue, and extortions to meet the deficit fell on the humble and the weak. Yet the chief financial officers grew enormously rich, and were adepts in refined luxury, masking their revels by an affectation of philosophy. ‘We are well off,’ they would say; ‘of what use is reform?’ The land tax, the poll tax, the best tithes of the produce for the priest, twentieths, military service, taxes on consumption, labor on the highways, crushed the peasantry. The indirect taxes were farmed out to commissioners, who had power to enforce extortionate demands by summarily sending the demurrers to the galleys or the scaffold.

The protective system superintended the use of capital. The right to labor was a privilege sold for the benefit of the finances, and labor itself was so bound in the meshes of innumerable rules, that manufactures grew up timidly under the dangerous favor of arbitrary encouragement. The progress of agriculture was still hindered by the servitudes of the soil. Each little farm was in bondage under a complicated system of irredeemable dues, to roads and canals; to the bakehouse and the brewery of the lord of the manor; to his winepress and his mill; to his tolls at the river, the market, or the fair; to ground rents, and quit rents, and fines on alienation.