Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/86

 the goods were imported in American ships. The Americans thus paid us off in our own coin, and continued this retaliatory system till 1817, when they passed the Navigation Act to which I have just referred, in all respects analogous to our own. Nor, indeed, can there be any question but that they were fully justified in these retaliatory measures. If one nation insists on excluding the vessels of other nations from their trade, they must naturally expect that the legislators of the countries, whose vessels are thus excluded, will take similar steps, even to the injury of their own people; in fact, this is just what England did when she prohibited her people from obtaining from other countries, at the lowest cost, the produce or manufactures essential for their existence.

But besides this, these restrictive measures on the part of Great Britain, had in more than one instance, proved, in many other respects, most injurious to her own people, while inflicting the greatest hardships and most lamentable sufferings on her own West Indian colonies. Thus, between 1780 and 1787 no less than 15,000 slaves perished from starvation, having been unable to obtain the requisite supplies of food from the North American colonies at a period, when the home-grown portion of their sustenance had been destroyed by several hurricanes. Yet, notwithstanding this terrible calamity, the British Parliament persevered in the system it adopted, and ultimately passed an Act (28 Geo. III., cap. 6) whereby no goods could be imported into the West Indies from the United States, even in British ships, except about thirty enumerated articles, the produce