Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/413

 reason, that it was an error to imagine that because San Francisco formed the limit of the United States' coasting trade, the entrances and clearances at that port exhibited the entire amount of the trade along the American seaboard.

It was, indeed, an evasion to say that the American coasting trade, meaning the western coast only, never afforded employment to more than 200,000 tons of American ships. The records of these pages afford proofs to the contrary. All mention of the trade between the ports of the Northern States and those of the Gulf of Mexico is, for some reason or other, suppressed. All the vast and lucrative carrying trade between New York and Boston, New Orleans and Mobile and Charleston, is studiously kept out of view; trades far more valuable than that of San Francisco and of the whole western coast, collectively. The argument, therefore, set up by the Board of Trade, "that the participation of the Californian trade, however desirable, cannot be regarded as a circumstance which could exercise any important influence on the shipping interests of Great Britain," was altogether unsatisfactory. Magnanimous as it was of the English Legislature to throw open the foreign, as well as the colonial commerce and navigation of the Empire, and the coasting trade afterwards, without imposing any previous conditions, such a liberal policy has, evidently, been unappreciated by the Americans, who seem resolved to monopolise all advantages resulting from their geographical position.