the greed of the traffickers, the white population was in danger of being swamped; breeders who raised slaves for the domestic market naturally resented the competition of the importers; and masters already well supplied grew anxious as they saw the value of their property falling with the continued influx of new stock. In response to such considerations, a few of the colonies attempted to prohibit the slave trade, only to be defeated by royal vetoes. The ruling classes of England were in no mood to cut off the princely dividends received from that lucrative branch of English commerce and the volume of business seems to have increased with fair regularity until the crash of the Revolution.
While the owners of manors, plantations, and huge estates found little difficulty in obtaining labor for their fields, those who sought to develop manufacturing had no such good fortune. Various inducements, such as special privileges and bounties, were offered to skilled artisans in England to attract them to America, but with little success. Furthermore, those who did come were seldom content to work long for masters. As soon as a journeyman or apprentice became well acquainted with the trade of the country, he hurried out into a new settlement to establish himself in a small but independent business, or finding that he could buy a farm with a few years' savings, he shook the dust of the towns off his feet and went into the country in search of economic freedom. "So vast is the territory of North America," wrote Franklin, "that it will require many ages to settle it fully; and till it is fully settled, labor will never be cheap here, where no man continues long to labor for others." Accordingly, the merchant capitalist of the colonial era, who engaged a few skilled workmen to manufacture for his trade, was continually handicapped, except in times of business depression, by the lack of an abundant supply of docile labor. Still there was springing up in the chief centers, such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, a body of artisans numerous enough to
