Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/763

1607-1750.] a “home industry” on which New Englanders depended for much of their support. 20. The colonial system of England differed in no respect from that of other European nations of the time; probably none of them could have conceived any other as possible. The colonies were to be depôts for the distribution of home products on a new soil; whenever they assumed any other functions they were to be checked. The attempts of the Americans to engage in commerce with other nations, their shipbuilding, and their growing manufactures were, in appearance, deductions from the general market of English producers, and the home Government felt itself bound to interfere. Virginia claimed, by charter-right, the power to trade freely with foreign nations; and Virginia was notoriously on the side of the Stuarts against the Parliament. In 1651 parliament

passed the Navigation Act, forbidding the carrying of colonial produce to England unless in English or colonial vessels, with an English captain and crew. By the Act of 1661 the reach of the system was extended. Sugar, tobacco, indigo, and other “enumerated articles,” grown or manufactured in the colonies, were not to be shipped to any country but England. All that was necessary to make this part of the work complete was to add to the “enumerated articles,” from time to time, any which should become important colonial products. The cap-stone was placed on the system in 1663, when the exportation of European products to the colonies was forbidden unless in vessels owned and loaded as in the preceding Acts and loaded in England. Virginia's commerce withered at once under the enforcement of the system. New England, allowed to evade the system by Cromwell for political reasons, continued to evade it thereafter by smuggling and bold seamanship.

21. In 1699, on complaint of English manufacturers that the colonists were cutting them out of their foreign wool markets, parliament enacted that no wool or woollen manufactures should be shipped from any of the colonies, under penalty of forfeiture of ship and cargo. This was the first fruits of the appointment of the Board of Trade and Plantations three years before. From this time until the revolution, this body was never idle; but, as its work was almost confined to schemes for checking or destroying the trade and manufactures of the plantations, it cannot be said to have done them any great service. It was continually spurring on colonial governors to turn their people to the production of naval stores, or to any occupation which would divert them from manufactures; and the governors, between fear of the legislatures which paid their salaries and of the Board which was watching them narrowly, had evidently no easy position. At intervals the Board heard the complaints of English manufacturers, and framed remedial bills for parliament. From 1718 the manufacture of iron was considered particularly obnoxious; and, so late as 1766, Pitt himself asserted the right and duty of parliament to “bind the trade and confine the manufactures” of the colonies, and to do all but tax them without representation. In 1719 parliament passed its first prohibition of iron manufactures in the colonies; and in 1750 it forbade under penalties the maintaining of iron-mills, slitting or rolling mills, plating-forges, and steel-furnaces in the colonies. At the same time, but as a favour to English manufacturers, it allowed the importation of American bar-iron into England, as it was cheaper and better than the Swedish. Before this, in 1731, parliament had forbidden the manufacture or exportation of hats in or from the colonies, and even their transportation from one colony to another. All these Acts, and others of a kindred nature, were persistently evaded or defied; but the constant training in this direction was not a good one for the

maintenance of the connexion between the colonies and the mother country, after the interested classes in the colonies should become numerous and their interests large. Unluckily for the connexion, the arrival at this point was just the time when the attempt was first made to enforce the Acts with vigour (§ 38).

22. English imports from the North-American colonies amounted to £395,000 in 1700, £574,000 in 1730, and £761,000 in 1760; the exports to the colonies in the same years were £344,000, £537,000, and £2,612,000. In spite of parliamentary exactions and interferences, a great and entirely new market had been opened to English trade. The difference between the year 1606, when there was not an English settler on the North American continent, and 1760, when there were a million and a half with a great and growing commerce, is remarkable. It is still more remarkable when one considers that this population was already nearly one-fourth of that of England and Wales. Its growth, however, steadily increased the difficulties of maintaining the English system of control, which consisted mainly in the interference of the governors with legislation proposed by the assemblies. As the numbers and material interests of the subjects increased, the necessities for governmental interference increased with them, and yet the power of the subjects to coerce the governors increased as well. Only time was needed to bring the divergence to a point where change of policy must have disruption as its only alternative.

23. Merely material prosperity, the development of wealth and comfort, was very far from the whole work of the colonies. In spite of attempts in almost every colony to establish some form of religious belief on a government foundation, religious freedom had really come to prevail to an extent very uncommon elsewhere at the time. Even in New England, where the theory of the state as an isolated opportunity for the practice of a particular form of worship had been held most strongly, persecution was directed chiefly against the Quakers, and that mainly on semi-political grounds, because of their determination to annoy congregations in their worship or to outrage some feeling of propriety. As soon as it came to be realized that the easiest method to deprive them of the power of annoyance was to ignore them, that method was adopted; indeed, two of the New England colonies took hardly any other method from the beginning.

24. In political work the colonies had been very successful. They had built up thirteen distinct political units, representative democracies so simple and natural in their political structure that time has hardly changed the essential nature of the American State governments. In so doing, the Americans were really laying the foundations of the future national structure, for there is hardly a successful feature in the present national government which was not derived or directly copied from the original colonial growths; while the absolutely new features, such as the electoral system (§ 119), introduced into the national system by way of experiment, have almost as generally proved failures, and have been diverted from their original purposes or have become obsolete.

25. The English settlements along the Atlantic had covered the narrow strip of coast territory quite thoroughly before it was possible to think of expansion westward.

Since about 1605 Canada had been undisputedly in the hands of the French. Their traders and missionaries had entered the present western United States; Marquette and Joliet (1673) and La Salle (1682) had explored the upper Mississippi river, and others, following their track, had explored most of the Mississippi valley and had built forts