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 to the productive classes, and thus diminishing the chief branch of freight enjoyed by the United States shipping.

The experience of the interval from 1783 to 1791, when American trade was so much depressed, had not been lost upon keen and calm observers, and many able American writers incessantly pointed to the vast, rich, fertile uncultivated lands in the south and west of the Union, as the inexhaustible mine of wealth from which the future greatness and power of the States must be derived, and urged their countrymen to encourage and direct their efforts to that branch of domestic industry. This salutary advice was not altogether lost at that time upon the Americans; but it has since been ardently pursued, with what success the exports of the articles of corn and cotton alone will fully establish.

Nevertheless, the shipowners of the United States were at the earliest period of their existence as a nation infected with the principles of self-protection on which the English Navigation Act had been founded; for in the very first session of Congress, 1789, the shipwrights of Baltimore and South Carolina, in rehearsing their grievances to the House of Representatives, copied identically the numerous complaints urged on this side the water. They pointed out the diminished state of ship-building in America, and the ruinous restrictions to which their vessels were subject in foreign ports; and, among the advantages looked for from the national government, was the increase of the shipping and maritime strength of the United States of America