Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/354

 demands for raw cotton required to be supplied. Even in a state of war every nation must of necessity provide as far as possible for the supply and sale of those raw materials of produce, the manipulation of which tends in a great degree to employ the industry and promote the general prosperity of large classes of the community. England had been thus compelled to sacrifice, or evade by licences or otherwise, her Orders in Council, although every statesman who could exercise a disinterested judgment had a full conviction of their expediency under the circumstances in which she was then placed. In like manner the United States, a few years previously, had been compelled to sacrifice their system of embargoes, which was a favourite policy of the actual dominant party in America; and the Czar, in his incipient efforts, had been incited to resist Napoleon's dictation as to what merchant vessels he should or should not admit into his ports, although this decision raised the question of the existence of national independence.

But with all these obvious principles patent to every legislator in both Houses of Parliament, it is the fact that a duty of per pound was levied on the importation of if imported in British ships, and per pound if imported in ''ships not British built''. Such were the strange anomalies of protection and such the difficulties which all similar legislative measures must ever create in the necessary commercial intercourse between nations. England has, however, now happily corrected all this fallacious legislation, and consequently a population of wealth and national power has been created in