ies, and tea"[29] . They were imposed as the external taxes that Franklin had said would meet less opposition, but they were still opposed. The words of Lord Grenville several years before must have echoed in the minds of every man who had been present in Parliament at that time. He said, "I cannot understand the difference between external and internal taxes. They are the same in effect and differ only in name"[30] . How true those words were. This time, the colonists were so serious about not purchasing anything with any tax on it that went to the British government that they signed a pact amongst themselves stating that they would not purchase any goods coming to the colonies from England. When these tariffs were protested in the colonies, Parliament began to feel as though "The colonial merchants demanded in effect free trade . . . or [at least] easy smuggling"[31] . Free trade was something that the mother country England did not even have. All Englishmen paid their taxes. There was no one on English soil, even on the Island of England, who was exempt from any of these taxes. Any sympathy in England for the colonists diminished significantly when they protested this set of laws along with all of the other ones as well. And the realization that they would never willingly pay their taxes to the British Crown turned out to be "the beginning of the end"[32] . The people in England who had at first supported the stubbornness of the American colonists began to dislike them and their attempts to avoid their taxes at all costs. The reason for this could be blamed on the Townshend Acts as well. Through the Townshend Acts, the colonists were being pinched, and the English merchants were feeling the squeeze all the way across the Atlantic Ocean in a land 3000 miles away. "The boycott on British goods, particularly tea, threatened the livelihood of many English merchants. More and more sympathy for America was confined to those narrow circles ...
