By the Treaty of Breda each nation retained the goods and moveables they had respectively captured; and, by the nineteenth article, all ships of war as well as merchant vessels belonging to the United Provinces, meeting on British waters any of her ships of war, were required “to strike the flag and lower the sail as had been formerly practised.” Thus terminated this bitter and bloody struggle. If England suffered much, Holland, with a larger capital but fewer permanent resources, suffered still more severely.
Its effects.
Turning to events more within our province, it may be mentioned that, on the authority of Sir Josiah Child, the opponents of the Navigation Laws point out with exultation that, thirty years after these stringent Acts came into operation, “the Dutch were beating us in every quarter.” Such may have been the case in some special branches of commerce, but it is undeniable that, from the date of these laws, the merchant navy of England steadily increased; and that soon afterwards the power over the seas previously claimed by the Dutch was permanently transferred to the English. Whatever may have been the cause of these changes, whether the Navigation Acts, or “the stoppage of trade, insecurity of capital, inherited debts, and taxes on ships” sustained by the Dutch during the war, England’s maritime resources increased, while those of Holland declined; and London became what Amsterdam once was, the chief emporium of the commercial world. Perhaps the resolution of England to depend upon her own people instead of courting foreign aid by legislative measures, combined with the exclusion of foreign shipping from her rapidly-increasing colonial trade, had more to do with these changes than the other combined reasons which the political economists of various ages have assigned.
The colonial system.
Partial anomalies.
Capital created,
Economical theories the prelude to final free trade.
By what was known as the “Colonial System,” Great Britain secured not merely the exclusive carrying trade of all produce derived from her own plantations, but she exercised the monopoly of supplying them from this side of the Atlantic with such articles as they required or could afford to consume, while sharing in the carrying trade and commerce of those parts of the world to which she had access in common with other maritime states. Many anomalies and some positive self-injuries, however, sprang out of this exclusive system, which of late years have been exposed in all their deformities. But it cannot be disputed, that whatever flagrant evils the exclusive colonial system engendered it was upon the whole one which tended materially to develop the maritime energies of British shipowners; and the rapidity with which the colonies in the West Indian Archipelago and on the continent of America rose to importance both in wealth and population, demonstrates that though not so advantageous as it otherwise might have been, it was certainly not as disastrous to the colonists as partial American historians would have us believe. There may at first have existed a paucity of sufficient capital and a deficiency of English ships to carry on with the fullest advantage the trade thus created; but this want was speedily supplied, and the foundation laid for an exclusive but highly flourishing trade and navigation, which continued in full vigour for more than a century, when the revolt of the North American Colonies formed a new epoch in history, and, by raising up an independent maritime people as direct rivals in the carrying trade of the world, gave a deathblow to a system no longer fitted for the new state of things. During this long interval the theory of trade and navigation became better understood. The French economists,[187] made intelligible and even popular by Adam Smith’s great work, threw a flood of light on the faults prevailing in the most economical distribution of wealth in relation with colonies. But the arguments of theorists would have remained disregarded had the increasing number and influence of the American colonists and the attitude assumed by the Northern maritime powers not rendered it impossible to maintain a system now become obsolete, and the wisdom of the governments of both England and the United States effected a change which has proved not only to be safe, but salutary for all parties interested in this great commercial revolution.
Eventual separation from the mother country considered.
In the middle of the seventeenth century it was indeed unreasonable to expect that England, after her heavy expenditure on settlements all over the globe, would relinquish advantages from which the first adventurers, and ultimately the entire nation, anticipated some return for the amount invested in the plantations and in the ships fitted out for the carrying trade. Even those writers who expatiate on the general unremunerative character of her colonial possessions, with especial reference to Canada, do not consider the foundation of colonies inexpedient, but, on the contrary, admit unreservedly “that colonies have been in their consequences highly advantageous to this, as they have been to most old settled countries in all ages.”[188] Therefore, whatever differences of opinion may prevail respecting the relinquishment of the governmental powers of the mother country over a powerful colony as soon as it is capable of defending itself and of directing its own affairs, every person concurs in the expediency of forming new colonies, their eventual severance from the parent state being only a question of the more or less satisfactory progress they may make towards a position of independence. At the period when the English Navigation Laws were inaugurated in imitation of the successful policy of pre-existing maritime states, there is no doubt that the Dutch[189] naval predominance on the seas rendered the distant possessions of Great Britain not only extremely insecure, but enabled her acute neighbours to carry away part of the prey which had been really acquired by her “bow and spear.”