Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/391

 or, more properly, this differential, duty was in contradiction to the spirit of the treaties which subsisted between the United States and Great Britain.

Two modes were proposed to the American Legislature to obviate the disadvantages resulting to the carrying trade of the United States from these countervailing and differential duties. The one was, to increase the American discriminating (differential?) duties, so as to counteract the injury they experienced from the operation of the countervailing duties of other nations. The other was, to relinquish the American duties (so far as they related to goods, wares, and merchandise, the growth, produce, or manufacture of the nations to which the ship in which these were imported belonged) in favour of such foreign nations as would agree to abolish such of their discriminating duties as were in their operation injurious to the interests of the United States.

The mere intimation of a design to inaugurate something like a policy of reciprocity, if not of entirely free-trade, struck alarm into the minds of the shipowners and shipbuilders of the United States. They held meetings, in which their patriotic feelings of indignation, as seems to have been the case in other countries as well, were singularly intermingled