Note 62 — Chapter III
Reading edition
The enormous increase of the national debt having occasioned a prodigious number of new taxes, the augmentation of officers to levy those duties, had been a very principal cause of extending the influence of the Crown, by the vast number of votes it necessarily commanded in all the great commercial towns and ports. Such a bill as this here mentioned was warmly contended for in 1781, and actually was obtained in 1782 on the change of the Administration.