Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/249

 *ing against English shipping, though the policy of retaliation then adopted did not always remedy the evil complained of. Hence it is that we find incessant remonstrances by shipowners that foreigners came to English ports with freights and cargoes of small value, and loaded tin, lead, and other goods only to be obtained in England, and their assertion that, by the help of drawbacks and of bounties freely conceded abroad, the foreigners gained, on the whole, a larger freight than English vessels could do in the same time. English shipowners sought, therefore, to obtain fresh limitations on the foreigner, so as to raise their freights to an equality with those earned in the general market of the world. In the statements thus set forth, the shipowners, however, were compelled to admit that "at all foreign ports which had no shipping of their own, ours (English) are always chosen preferable to the ships of any other nation."

Of the "Seven Years' War" it is not our province to write, but of its results as affecting the English colonial arrangements, we may remark that the expenses of that war mainly induced the Legislature to pass in 1764 the Act of 4 George III., chap. 15, which ultimately led to the separation of the North American colonies from Great Britain. This Act, combined with various conditions taken from the Navigation Laws, requiring heavy duties on numerous articles imported into the colonies from the countries that produced them, or from anywhere else except from Great Britain, and prohibiting the importation of sugar from the colonies, except in British bottoms, necessarily aroused the indignation of the