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in her commercial treaties with other foreign powers; expressly excepting, however, any article allowing the ships of the United States to protect the property of the enemies of Great Britain in time of war, which should on no account be admitted. On the other hand, the more violent partisans in America for unrestricted trade with the West Indies threatened to break off all commercial intercourse with Great Britain unless their demands were complied with. In this controversy it is amusing to observe that grave members of the English Council actually gave an authoritative opinion: "That the articles which the people of the United States now send to European markets are but few, and can be obtained in equal perfection from other countries; and," they added, " that the demand for them from thence should in future ." If these short-sighted mortals could but have opened the book of the future, and could have contemplated the prodigious supply of cotton, and corn, and other raw produce which have been derived from the United States since the resources of its fertile and varied soil have been developed, they would have paused before they hazarded such crude and altogether erroneous vaticinations. They, moreover, decried the trade in grain as precarious, and asserted that no system of foreign commerce permanently profitable could be founded upon it.

Happily, however, a treaty of amity and commerce and navigation was at last concluded between the two nations; but we need only here refer to those portions of it which more especially affected their