Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/88

 been regulated by Orders in Council. This treaty, which gave even greater dissatisfaction in the United States than in England, was not ratified by Congress till 1796; nor was the Act for giving effect to it in Great Britain passed till the following year.

This Act, however, made no provision for the admission of American vessels generally into our colonies. It simply provided that American ships were at liberty to import into Great Britain such produce of their own States as was admissible in British vessels; it moreover imposed a tonnage duty on the ships, and a discriminating duty on the goods imported by them, in order to countervail any duties levied on goods imported into the United States by British ships. The provisions of the treaty as to opening the trade of the West Indies appear to have fallen to the ground. An additional article to the treaty of 1794 stipulated that the article containing those provisions shall be suspended; while a later treaty (1806) contained a recital that the two high contracting parties had been unable to arrange the terms on which the commerce between the United States and the West Indies was to be carried on. In fact, they came to no definite arrangements till the United States passed their retaliatory Acts in 1817 and 1820, and, even then, it took more than ten years to settle the differences between them on almost any one question. Indeed, the only alterations of any importance made between 1806 and the passing of the American Navigation Act, in 1817, were the opening of the trade between the United States and our North American colonies, in 1807, and the conclusion of a treaty in 1815 abolishing the