Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 2.djvu/82

80 havens and bays, in so narrow a sea that all foreign ships that sail either to the eastward or westward are necessitated, even in fair weather, to shun the dangerous French coast, and sail along that of England, and in stormy weather to run in and preserve their lives, ships, and merchandize in its bays—so that England now, by its conjunction with Scotland, being much increased in strength, as well by manufactures as by a great navigation, will in all respects be formidable to all Europe. For, according to the proverb, a master at sea is a master at land; and more especially a king of England, seeing he is able, both by whole fleets and private ships of war, at all times to seize on ships sailing by the coast—the westerly winds, which blow for most part of the year on this side of the tropic, giving the English great opportunities to sail out of their numerous bays and harbours at pleasure to infest our navigation."

Many particulars with regard to the state of the different branches of our foreign commerce about this time are to be collected from Sir Josiah Child's New Discourses on Trade, written in 1665 (at his country-house, "in the sickness-year," as he informs us), and first published in 1668. A second and greatly enlarged edition appeared in 1690. Child was an eminent London merchant, and his views on many subjects were in advance of his age: but there is certainly no soundness in the leading doctrine of the present work, which is, that the principal cause of national wealth is a low rate of interest established by law, the fact being, that the national rate of interest, being merely another name for the price of credit, is always dependent upon the state of the market of credit, that is to say, upon the supply of disposable capital and the demand for it by borrowers; and that all that the establishment of a legal rate of interest can do is in some degree to impede and disturb the course of the influences which regulate the natural rate, and which, if they were left to themselves, would determine the actual rate. In other words, a low rate of interest, instead of being, as Child imagined, a cause of national wealth, by which he meant the accumulation