Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 2.djvu/205

Rh absence of any account of our coasting trade, proves nothing: as to the amount of the general mercantile marine of the kingdom. The tonnage of the royal navy, which at the end of the last reign was 170,862 tons, was in 1741, 198,387; in 1749, 228,215; in 1754, 226,246; and in 1760, 321,104.

Another indication of the advancing wealth of the country throughout this reign is afforded by the regularly augmenting produce of the Sinking Fund, which was made up from the surplus yielded by the ordinary taxes over and above certain fixed payments with which they were made chargeable. The Sinking Fund, therefore, may be regarded as an index of the productiveness of the national taxation, which, again, was itself an index of the consumption of the people as determined by their numbers and their ability to purchase necessaries and luxuries. Now the surplus paid over to the Sinking Fund, which, at its establishment in 1717, was only 323,427l., and by 1724 had only reached 653,000l., had in 1738 come to be no less than 1,231,127l., and it appears to have gone on increasing at the same rate to the end of the reign, seeing that in 1764, the next date at which we find it noted, it is stated to have been about 2,200,000l. Part of this increase is no doubt to be attributed to the increase of population; but that cause alone will not nearly account for the whole of it.

One of the sources to which the stream of our commerce owed its gradual and steady expansion throughout this reign was the growing importance of our possessions in the islands and on the continent of America. Of the attractions which the latter already presented to persons who found themselves in want of employment or in straitened circumstances in the old world, or for any other reason sought a new country in which to better their fortunes, we may judge from an account which has been preserved of the arrivals from Europe in the single