Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/432

 *vantage than then existed, especially when compared with the producer of slave-grown sugar and coffee in Brazil and Cuba. The Committee, therefore, looking to our relations with Canada, our possessions in the East and West Indies, and, above all, in Australia, considered it their duty, unhesitatingly, to declare that any proposal having for its object the re-*establishing an exclusive monopoly of the carrying trade to and from our colonial possessions must, both on political and commercial grounds, be rejected as altogether impracticable. Moreover, that, while such a step would be unjust to our fellow-subjects in the colonies, it would very likely embroil us with those foreign Powers to whom we were bound by existing treaties.

The question, however, of the expediency of requiring foreign Powers, having colonial possessions, to reciprocate every advantage to us, which Great Britain had accorded unconditionally to them, though, commercially, when compared with other branches of commerce, unimportant, was one which demanded peculiar attention, as it was, and still is, a source of great annoyance, in that it creates a feeling that we have been very illiberally, if not unjustly, dealt with by these Powers. British Shipowners who, carried on the restricted and scarcely tolerated intercourse with the colonies of France, Spain, and Portugal, found their ships placed at an immense disadvantage, in the unequal competition they had to encounter, while they had the mortification to see foreign ships resort to our own colonies and secure much higher freights than our own ships when chartered to a port in Europe. *