When we add to this economic maladjustment, according to the current theory, the unique position of the New England colonies as chartered or practically independent governments, it is obvious how anomalous their relations were to the imperial scheme. From the standpoint of contemporary opinion, it was not unnatural that they should be regarded by many as “the unfortunate results of misdirected efforts.” Nor was it merely that they failed to fit in with the rest of the Empire. As they grew in population, and in their avowed independence of all external control of any sort, many an Englishman must have felt the fear expressed by one of the ablest economic writers of the latter part of the Empire's first century. Of all the American plantations, D'Avenant wrote in 1698, New England “is the most proper for building ships and breeding seamen, and their soil affords plenty of cattle; besides which, they have good fisheries, so that, if we should go to cultivate among them the art of navigation, and teach them to have a naval force, they may set up for themselves, and make the greatest part of our West-Indian Trade precarious,” as well as absorbing the colonial carrying trade and merchandizing.[[729]] It has, indeed, been conjectured that Cromwell's attempt, in 1665, to induce a large number of the New Englanders to emigrate to the newly conquered island of Jamaica derived directly from the failure of their colonies to fit into the mercantile empire,[[730]] although, to the present writer, other economic and military motives seem quite as likely.[[731]]
From this theory of empire sprang certain practical corollaries. In part to avoid allowing foreigners to benefit from the imperial trade, and to retain the carrying profits within the Empire, but mainly to build up the merchant fleet, it was decreed that all goods must be transported in vessels belonging to the mother-country or her colonies. Foreign goods, according to the theory, would have to be excluded as far as possible from the colonial markets, the products of the latter limited to the English market, and colonial manufacturing restrained so as not to compete with home-made goods, although the theory was never fully translated into practice. On the other hand, as a partial offset to such laws as were passed, which mainly redounded to the benefit of England so far as their direct results were concerned, colonial produce was, to some extent, given preferential treatment in that country, and, in some important particulars, Englishmen were forbidden to compete with the colonists. The colonies were also afforded protection against the aggression of foreign nations. No colony could possibly have remained independent. The choice was not between the English Empire and independence, but between being subject to Protestant and, as the world went then, liberal England, or to Catholic France or Spain.
As we have already said, in the second half of the seventeenth century, Colbert, the great minister of Louis XIV, was applying the Mercantile doctrine to the upbuilding of the French overseas empire with a rigor that the English never attained. When he excluded all foreign vessels from the French colonial carrying-trade, there was, as yet, no sufficient French merchant fleet to serve colonial needs, and the West India planters were brought to the verge of starvation and ruin. If they “were hungry, barefooted and in rags,” writes the historian of Colbert's policy, “they must count these things as a bit of temporary suffering, to be endured for the upbuilding of French commerce. They must wait for the law of supply and demand to operate and bring them, sooner or later, an abundance from France.... But he was demanding too much. What meant the noble idea of restoring French commerce and the upbuilding of a mighty colonial empire to the planters in the West Indies, whose empty bellies were crying for food, whose nakedness demanded to be clothed?”[[732]] Nor were the colonial measures of the other nations less repressive.[[733]] Both religious and economic interests, therefore, made it desirable that the English colonies should remain within the English Empire; and it was the power of England alone which enabled them to do so. For it was not a question, for example, of the sturdy New England settlers warding off attacks from the far fewer French inhabitants of Canada. No colony was self-supporting or economically self-contained. Cut off from access to the mother-country, deprived of her protection on the ocean trade-routes, they would inevitably wither and die, or be absorbed into one of the rival and less liberal empires.[[734]] The allegiance of the colonists of various nations was in only slight measure determined by their own comparative strengths, and almost wholly by the naval powers of the home countries.
Such, in brief outline, was the European theory of empire held during our colonial period, some of the main features in the practical application of which can be traced back for several centuries before ever the question of empire arose, as we have indicated in our earlier chapters.[[735]] The old life of the Middle Ages, which had been largely municipal, had become national. The extraordinary energy of the new period, facing an entire globe to be appropriated and exploited, rapidly developed national spirit into imperial ambition, and the old ideas and practices of a small and legally restricted commerce had to be suddenly adapted and enlarged to meet a situation unprecedented in history. The surprising fact is not that, in so many ways, the theory and practice of empire-making should have contained errors and worked injustices, but that one which, after all, proved highly successful, should have been developed so immediately and so surely.
Until comparatively recently, the Mercantile Theory was regarded as a sinister device to give play to the selfish profiteering of the English merchant-class. It is, however, coming more and more to be recognized as a necessary step in the evolution of the modern state. “What was at stake,” writes Schmoller, who was the leader in these newer views, “was the creation of real political economies as unified organisms, the centre of which should be, not merely a state policy reaching out in all directions, but rather the living heart-beat of a united sentiment. Only he who thus conceives of mercantilism will understand it; in its innermost kernel it is nothing but state-making, not state-making in a narrow sense, but state-making and national-economy-making at the same time; state-making in the modern sense, which creates out of the political community an economic community, and so gives it a heightened meaning. The essence of the system,” he adds, “lies not in some doctrine of money, or of the balance of trade; not in tariff barriers, protective duties, or navigation laws; but in something far greater, namely, in the total transformation of society and its organization, as well as of the state and its institutions; in the replacing of a local and territorial economic policy by that of the national state.”[[736]]
Modern critics of the theory have been prone to lay stress upon the obvious defects and shortcomings which appear in the workings of the enactments designed to translate it into practice. As a matter of fact, the policy proved successful, in spite of the eventual loss to England, a century later, of a portion of her colonies; while in a different and higher form, that of an imperial federated Zollverein, it is still regarded by many as the solution of the possibly insoluble problem of imperial government.
In a speech at the Savoy, in London, in 1917, the Premier of Newfoundland, England's oldest colony, gave notable expression to such a return to the policy of an earlier day. “This Empire,” he said, “cannot live as a political empire unless it is developed as an economic empire. All the raw material produced in the Empire should be manufactured in the Empire before it leaves the Empire, and nothing should be admitted into the Empire that could be produced in the Empire.”[[737]] Let us not condemn too hastily the economic theories of the seventeenth century until we are quite sure whither those of the twentieth are to lead us.
The strength of an ocean empire lies wholly in sea-power, and the roots of sea-power in the merchant marine. By her application of the Mercantile Theory, England forced the Dutch, who had “run hackney all the world over,” from the carrying-trade of her colonies; and for all the centuries since, she has been the great commercial nation of the world. France, who abandoned Colbert's policy, and turned her back on the sea in 1672, embarking upon a career of Continental conquest, was, during the next century, to be beaten by England single-handed for the first time since the Middle Ages, to have her merchant shipping swept away, and to lose Martinique, Guadaloupe, Canada, and India to her rival.[[738]]
It has too frequently been assumed to be an obvious conclusion that the Navigation Acts of the seventeenth century were a colossal blunder, because, in part, the commercial policy of England lost her the continental colonies in the eighteenth. Those who would commit themselves to such a view might well determine whether, had England not made use of the weapons of the earlier century, and thus developed that naval power which alone enabled her to protect her American possessions, she would have had any colonies left, continental or other, to be kept or lost by any policies which she might adopt in the later period.
Having glanced at the theory of empire as it was understood by those at home, we must turn to consider the measures adopted to reduce it to practice, and also the views of imperial relations held by the colonists.