Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 2.djvu/152

150 dealings that have been between us. If they had not found their accounts in the prodigious quantity of effects annually exported thither from hence, and if so wise a state had perceived itself to carry on a losing trade, they would have put a stop to this mischief, either by prohibitions of, or high duties upon, our product and manufacture, for which they had a sufficient pretence from the additional impositions we have been compelled to lay upon their linens and other goods; but they have been too prudent to be frighted with the false appearance of an overbalance, well knowing, the more they brought from hence, the better opportunities they had to enlarge their general traffics." He then proceeds, by an examination of details, to show that the greater part of the commodities taken from us by the Dutch were in reality re-exported by them to other countries. In the course of this investigation he notices various facts which throw a light upon the then state both of our own commerce and of that of the world. The total value of our exports of woollen manufactures to Holland, which in 1703, as we have seen, was 1,339,526l., was in 1663 only 79,953l. Of three articles alone, perpetuanas, serges, and stuffs, we sent the Dutch in 1703 to the value of 798,527l., or ten times the amount of our whole exportation of woollens to them forty years before. That people cannot possibly, argues Davenant, have within the period in question so increased in numbers, wealth, and luxury, as to want for their own consumption so great a quantity of these articles over and above what they were wont to call for. "The fact is," he continues, "that they purchase those immense cargoes to re-export to other countries, and so they are become, in a more extended degree than heretofore, the carriers of our commodities to foreign markets; that is to say, they supply those parts which we, for want of industry, have not embraced, or where our traffic has been interrupted by the war. It is easy to prove that for the last twenty years great parcels of our hue draperies, and other woollen manufactures, went into France through Flanders by the connivance of governors,