foreign built ship, though bought by English owners, were privileged unless she had been taken as a prize, or, as Mr. Ricardo says, had been stolen. And all importa tions, of "a long list" of articles, were prohibited altogether, from Holland, the Netherlands and Germany. This, it has been admitted, was an unjust attempt to exclude these nations from all commerce, and was neither justifiable, according to the laws of nations or the principles of justice.

Now, although it may be true that these restrictions did injure the Hollanders, as all restrictions on trade must, yet their low freights still enabled them to prosper; and in 1691, thirty years after, Sir Joshua Child states that the Dutch were gradually beating the English in every quarter, and that in the Russian trade, in which the English had previously more than the Dutch, the latter then had twentytwo sail and the English but one. That they had driven. the English out of the Greenland trade, and while they increased manyfold in the East India trade, the English were on the decline, and had been entirely supplanted in some of the Spanish ports. Their trade with Norway had gone to Holstein, and to the Danes, and the trade in the herring fisheries on the eastern coast of England itself, and the trade of Scotland and Ireland from abroad, engrossed by these very Dutch, to the bereavement of the English; and that the trade of New-York, then taken by them from the Dutch, he thought would still be carried by the Dutch shipping.

What they had accomplished had been done by trading cheap and following the laws of competition, "whilst the English," says Sir Dudley North, "do not only proceed in their former more chargeable methods of trade, but have clogged their navigation and merchants more and more." The Hollander, "served the merchant," Sir Walter Raleigh tells us, "in his time, £50 cheaper to the ton, than the English, which would make some $12,000 less in a cargo of 500 tons."

The clause of the act which requires ships to be English built, and of English timber, Mr. Ricardo says, even to this day, has proved an injury to British shipping; for, on the continent, many nations could get it for half the price, and so, he says, "have the Dutch and French their cordage, masts, sails, tackle, pitch and tar, very much cheaper than the English; so that they can build and apparel a ship, or fit up and repair, at a less charge, by half, than the

English can." The Dutch seamen were cheaper, and were driven from the British service, which enabled English seamen to raise their wages. Thus, in thirty years after the passing of this maratime charter, and three hundred after the passing of the first navigation act, "the English," Sir Dudley North informs us, "were not capable of any employment in the carrying trade for any foreigners." They had, by their own measures, excluded themselves from all transportation, save their own; and that "this cheapness of the Dutch had not only increased their own manufactures, but those of all people that gave them reasonable, free and open trade, and that the dear naviga. tion of the English, and difficulties in trade at home, had driven them out of their manufactures, except some remnant of the clothing trade." Roger Coke says that, "by lessening the resort of strangers to our ports, it had a most injurious effect on our commerce." Sir Josiah Child admits that while their ships, in certain trades, decreased, foreign ships increased.

It will be seen, then, that after 300 years of experience and trial, these laws, arising out of national jealousy and animosity, failed, as well in their immediate and ultimate objects. The blow, intended to ruin the Dutch and to build up the British navy, succeeded in neither. It did not bring ruin upon the Dutch, as is now admitted by the ablest British writers; and that if it injured the Dutch, it equally injured themselves. We have the contemporary declarations of Roger Coke, Dudley North, Walter Raleigh, and of Sir Josiah Childs, and the assurance from Sir Mathew Decher, at a subsequent period, (1744) that instead of increasing their shipping and seamen, it had diminished them both, and that, by rendering freights higher, they had entailed a heavy burthen on the community, and had defeated themselves in their competition with the Dutch for the fisheries. "Trade," he says, "cannot, will not be forced; let other nations prohibit, by what severity they please, interest will prevail; they may embarass their own trade, but cannot hurt a nation whose trade is free so much as themselves." "The certain way to be secure is to be more powerful, that is, to extend our trade as far as it is capable of; and as restraints have proved its ruin, to reject them and depend on freedom for our security, bidding defiance to the French, or any nation in Europe."-Essay on the causes of the Decline of Foreign Trade.

For years after this act the Dutch continued to engross the carrying trade of the world, and they still excelled in the fisheries. Mr. McCulloch thinks there are good grounds for believing that it operated rather to diminish than to increase the English mercantile navy. That "navigation and naval power are the children, not the parents-the effect, uot the cause of commerce. If the latter increased, the increase of the former will follow as a matter of course. More ships and more sailors become necessary, according as the commerce between different and distant countries is extended."-Note 11th, to Smith's Wealth of Nations, p.

532.

Excessive taxation, arising from her wars with Cromwell, Charles II. and Louis XIV., her excessive borrowing, or funding system, whereby she was forced from her principle of free and cheap trading, and the "increased competition of other nations, springing from the gradual acquisition of industrial knowledge," these and not the British navigation laws, were the principle causes of the decline of the manufactures, commerce and navigation of Holland. She had her days of pre-eminence, and they were obtained not by navigation laws, but by such free and cheap trading, and that too, in a position much less advantageous than that of Great Britain, and she lost that pre-eminence because she was forced to abandon her former course, and not by force of the navigation laws, as the vanity of the English nation has led many of her writers to think. The British in their turn, have had their pre-eminence brought about, not by their navigation laws, but from other causes, and dispite of those laws. Her insular position, her coal, iron, tin and the consequence thereof, her manufactures and her numerous colonies, have rendered her "the store house and workshop of the world."-See Industrial History of Free Nations, by McCullagh.

But to proceed with our history of these laws. In the time of Charles II., it was further required, by way of increasing England's monopoly, that all European products, before they could be exported to any of the colonies in Asia, Africa or America, should first be landed in England, and then reladen in British built ships, to be carried to such colonies. This was favoring her colonies as Mr. Clay would have the manufacturing States favor the agricultural! The restrictions on the colonies did not stop there: for none of their products could be carried any where, except to a sister colony, until

first landed in England and then be reshipped in British built vessels! So that, go or come where they would, with their products, they must first go to the expense of a voyage to England, and that, too, only in a British built vessel, which might not be at hand, while any number of vessels of a different nation might have been procurable at half the price. Ireland was not even treated as a colony, but as a foreign conquered country, for none of the products of the colonies could be carried there until first landed in England! And Ireland was held in this grossly unjust position until 1780, when, by the influence of Mr. Graltan, the commerce of the colonies was granted to her, and in that respect she was placed on a footing with Great Britain. (See letter of John Adams to the President of Congress, 26th March, 1780, Diplomatic Correspondence.) England is said to have been driven to the grant by fear of the Irish Volunteers. "But for these restrictions," says ou: author, "Ireland might have obtained her share of the world's trade, and England been the richer for the commerce, manufactures and industrial energy of her sister kingdoms."

At the commencement of the American Revolution, we could export or import nothing but in English vessels, no matter what freight they demanded; and we were allowed to export our produce to no other part of Europe but Great Britain; nor could we have imported our supplies from any other quarter of Europe, had we been starving for the want of them. Mr. Bancroft telis us that, "the activity of the ships of New-England excited envy in the minds of the English." American produce was not even allowed to be carried to the "mother country" in an American vessel. Certain articles produced in America might come in competition with such as were produced in England, and Sir Joshua Gee,* and other friends of British monopolies, uttered ridi

* See the Trade and Navigation of Great Britain considered; showing that the surest way to ncrease in riches is to preven' the mportation of such fore gn commodities as ma" be raised at home, 1730. Mr. Richmond, a great friend of the navigation laws and the protective policy, thus expressed himself, on his examination before the Parliamentary Committee: "Rather would I go back to the old law, and be without an export trade, than let Prussia, Russia, France and America, send the r ships here. I am one of those old ƒ shioned people that think tha the expor s to fore gn nations are a d ain rather than a gin to this co ntry, and that he less we send out of the coun ry the bet er." One would prohibit imports, the other expo ts! No foreign trade at all! Such the wisdom of the protectionists!

culous lamentations at the cruel injustice of allowing such competition, and immediately a list of these products were prohibited from being carried to any country subject to the crown of England, where they might come in competition with the favored products of England! So universal was this monopoly of the colony trade, that every thing consumed in the country, until within the recollection of the writer, except rice, bacon and tobacco, was "English." Even the flour of wheat, grown here, was called "English flour." "The law of the strongest, thus established," says Mr. Bancroft, (Hist, U. S.) "could endure no longer than their superiority of force; for durable relations in society are only those that are correlative and reciprocally beneficial." "Thus," he says, "the navigation laws, made on iniquitous principles, scattered the seeds of civil war, and contained the pledge of the ultimate independence of America ;" and, as Mr. Huskisson thought, was, under its exasperating effects, the true cause of the separation of the American States from the mother country. Being separated, it became an important matter to the new States to look to their commercial relations. England, conquered and discontented, was reluctant to treat at all. France and Spain, and even Holland, jealous of the power of Great Britain, and pursuing their own interest and policy in this, as they had done in every measure connected with our revolutionary struggle, by their intrigues, threw difficulties in the way of our treating with England. (See correspondence of Messrs. Jay and Adams, Diplomatic Correspondence, Letters of Mr. Jno. Adams to Mr. Livingston, 23d June, and 10th and 14th July, 1783, 8th vol., 67. 81.) In England the refugees and tories, hostile to America, clamored for the navigation act. America and the West Indies mutually desired commercial intercourse, so reciprocally beneficial-the refugees and tories wished to exclude the Americans from the West Indies, and opposed all cordial reconciliation. The views taken by Mr. Adams, who was then minister at Paris, in his correspondence with his government, would be reputable to the most distinguished free-trade writer of the present day. "The commerce of the West India Islands is a part of the American system of commerce. They cannot do without us, nor we without them. The creator has placed us upon the globe in such a situation that we have occasion for each other. We