To other hands, therefore, must be left the labor of describing, in detail, the bold and persistent opposition of " the Merchants "and Traders" to those long-established Navigation and Revenue Laws, which, by reason of a more honest administration of them, by those whom the commercial classes had not succeeded in corrupting with their accustomed bribes, had so seriously interfered with the very profitable "illicit trade" -- that more elegant phrase which was used, and which continues to be used, to describe what, elsewhere and among less comely offenders, was and is called by the more expressive term of "Smuggling" -- in which those "Merchants and Traders" had been so long and so profitably engaged; * and we can only glance, also, at that subsequently adopted system of intimidation which had been resorted to, by the same confederated mercantile offenders, under the guise of patriotism, but really for the promotion of their own selfish purposes, in their employment and direction of that other, less responsible and, not unfrequently, less respectable, populace, a marketable class which every large seaport can produce, sometimes in one manner and sometimes in another, quietly or violently, as had best answered the ends of those who had em-

1 "The dispute between Great Britain and America commenced in the "year 1764, with an attempt to prevent smuggling in America." -- A Collection of Interesting, Authentic Papers relative to the Dispute between Great Britain and America, 1764 to 1775. London: 1777-- commonly known as Almon*s Prior Documents -- 3.