Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/181

Rh aliens and strangers, do make at their proper wiIl and liberty, as by such buying and selling, which they use together, of all manner of merchandises, any of them with other, and also by covins and compassings that they do, to impair and abate the price and value of all manner of merchandises of this noble realm, and increase and enhance the price of all their own merchandises, whereby the said merchants aliens be greatly enriched, and the king's subjects, merchants denizens of the same realm, grievously impoverished, and great treasure by the same aliens brought out of this realm, the customs and subsidies by them due to the king greatly diminished, and the navy of the said realm greatly destroyed and hindered." Happy, says the Roman poet, is the man who is able to tell the causes of things! It is very difficult, however, to understand this parliamentary logic, or to see how either the consequences alleged, or any others of a pernicious sort, could flow from London or any other town in England being made, what Bruges, and Calais, and other continental emporia were, a place to which foreigners of all nations brought the produce of their respective countries for exchange with one another, as well as for the supply of the resident inhabitants. The only effect of prohibiting the former of these two kinds of traffic would be to prevent the foreign merchants from bringing with them so large a quantity of goods as they would otherwise have done.

The calamitous circumstances of the last eight or ten years of the nominal reign of Henry VI.—during the greater part of which period the kingdom was almost without a government, and the land a great battle-field—could not fail to be keenly felt by the tender plant of our rising foreign commerce. Although its growth was checked, however, by the storms with which it had now to contend, it was already too strong to receive more than a temporary injury; and it began to recover its former activity and prosperity as soon as some degree of tranquillity was restored. The reign of Edward IV. is I 2