262. Colonial policy.—An English historian who has been quoted several times before said that England “conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind,” implying that the movement was one of natural expansion rather than of conscious policy. This seems true when we contrast English colonization with that of other powers. Still, the government held from the first the idea that the colonies were a part of the home country, and should contribute in special ways to its advancement, and these ideas grew stronger and took more definite form as the colonies grew in size. The government permitted the movement of men and capital to America under the condition that the resources of the colonies should be made to supplement, not compete with, the resources of the mother country. We have to note here the regulations in which the government ideas were embodied.
263. Restrictions on colonial enterprise, regarded as justifiable at the time.—By the application of the Navigation Acts the colonists were required to employ English ships for their commerce, and to send certain enumerated wares of their production to England before they could be disposed of to another country; and by other acts they were restricted in the manufacture or exchange of certain articles (woolens, hats, bar-iron, and steel) for which English manufacturers desired to reserve the market. Aside from these restrictions the colonists were left free to produce and to trade as they pleased. They paid the usual duties, as a rule, on wares entering the English ports, but were allowed a drawback when the wares were exported again.
Comparing these restrictions with, for instance, those of Spain, we are struck with their liberality; still more so when it is added that the government gave some special favors to the colonists in the form of bounties, and colonial ships were put on an equal footing with those built at home, so that New England was a great gainer by the stimulus to ship-building and sailing. England was the natural market for most of the colonial wares, and the colonists, as we have seen, had few temptations to go into manufacturing. None of these restrictions, therefore, bore with great weight on the colonists, and an attempt to interfere in their trade with the French West Indies (by the Molasses Act of 1733) was evaded. The English colonial system was accepted as natural and reasonable by the colonists in general until shortly before the Revolution.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS
1. Make a graphic chart of imports and compare with present conditions, as suggested above under exports.
2. Insert the wares named in 251 and the following sections in the chart of imports according to continents, sect. 237.
3. History of the East India Company in the eighteenth century. [Cunningham, Growth; B. Willson, Ledger and sword, London, 1903, vol. 2.]
4. Compare the colonial market of England with that of Spain (see [chap. 20]) and that of France (see chap. [25]).
5. Write a report on the economic and commercial characteristics of one of the thirteen colonies, in the period preceding the Revolution. [See the chapters describing the condition of the separate colonies in 1765, in Lodge, English colonies, N. Y., Harper, 1881, $3.]
6. English imports of naval stores, and schemes to stimulate exports from America. [Lord, Industrial exper., part 2.]