Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 2.djvu/93

Rh The navigation laws are admitted to have been framed in a spirit of violent animosity against the Dutch, and to have had for one of their principal objects the depression of the mercantile superiority of that people, then in possession of the greater part of the carrying trade of the world. The Dutch were, in fact, deprived by these acts of so much of their carrying trade as consisted in importing goods to England and in exporting to other countries English home and colonial produce and manufactures; and the greater part of what they thus lost the English ship-owner gained. The English consumer,—in other words, the English public,—was, in a pecuniary sense at least, a gainer of nothing, but a considerable loser: the monopoly of the ship-owner was, of course, a tax upon the rest of the community. This tax, however, it has been said, was paid for the essential object of the national defence,—for the creation and maintenance of a naval strength which the country would not otherwise have possessed. The exact operation of indirect methods of procedure, such as the policy of the navigation laws is here assumed to be, will always afford matter for difference of opinion, and hardly admits of being satisfactorily determined; but it is certain that, however much commendation these laws have received in later times, the greatest doubts were entertained as to any public benefit being attributable to them by some of the ablest observers who had an opportunity of witnessing the effects they produced when they first came to change the natural course in which the commerce of the country was previously proceeding. Roger Coke, in his "Treatise on Trade," published in 1671, maintains that, by lessening the resort of strangers to our ports, they had had a most injurious effect on our commerce: he states that, within two years after the passing of the first partial Navigation Act in 1650 (the progenitor of that of the following year), we had lost through their operation the greater part of our Baltic and Greenland trades. Sir Josiah Child, although decidedly approving of the principle of the Navigation Act, corroborates Coke in so far by admitting, in his "Treatise on Trade," published in 1698, that "the English shipping