Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/462

 The term Colonie, or Colonie à Culture, is equivalent to the English word Plantation. Possession or établissement applies to such settlements as were made more especially for the purpose of trading, some of the other colonies and settlements being of a mixed character. In the process of time the name of Colonies, in the vocabulary of the Fiscal and Navigation Laws, came to be applied in a stricter sense to the three coffee and sugar islands which had remained to France, La Guadaloupe, la Martinique, and Bourbon (or la Réunion as it is now styled). These three colonies had always been more jealously guarded than the rest from foreign intrusion, and had remained very much under the same system; a series of special regulations common to each of them, placing them, as it were, apart from the rest. The rule as to foreign vessels was still exclusion, and prohibition against approaching the coast (with an exception in favour of the English flag by the second Treaty of Paris in 1763 as already stated) was still, in principle, maintained under the same penalty of confiscation, a penalty, however, not unfrequently disregarded.

These restrictive laws, as has been the case with all other countries, while most injurious to the mass of the people of France, are really of no benefit to the Shipowners of that country, in whose favour they had been passed and so long adhered to. A few individuals may now and again have been gainers, to the loss of the community at large, but a reference to the customs returns of that country too clearly demonstrates, that its shipping did not keep pace with the other branches of its commerce, and