Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/109

 local use, or pig iron for transport to the mills of England; but the more adventurous leaders, especially in the Northern colonies, were not so modest in their ambitions. They set up rolling and slitting mills; they manufactured nails, guns, chains, kettles, hardware, hinges, hoes, spades, and all the coarser articles that could be made of metal. The product of many a colonial foundry survives in the chimneys of Georgian houses and in the museums recently erected by reverent hands.

Though, to the statistician of modern trade, the industry of colonial America seems trivial, yet in comparison with the enterprise of England at the time it assumed serious proportions. At all events—and this is the point—in every branch it excited the fears and jealousies of English competitors. Even with the seven seas to command there was hot rivalry in fishing, so hot that, in 1775, an English writer exclaimed: "The Northern colonies have nearly beaten us out of the Newfoundland fisheries, that great nursery of seamen; insomuch that the share of New England alone exceeds that of Britain." Shipbuilders of the Thames, as we have said, protested that the American yards carried off their business, their workmen, and their profits.

Bursting out in anger over the growth of colonial carrying enterprises, a contemporary English observer complained bitterly that "the trading part of the colonies rob this nation of the invaluable treasure of 30,000 seamen and all the profits of their employment; or in other words, the Northern colonies, who contribute nothing to our riches and our power, deprive us of more than twice the amount of all the navigation we enjoy in consequence of the sugar islands, the Southern, continental, and tobacco settlements! The freight of the staples of those sets of colonies brings us in upwards of a million sterling; that is, the navigation of 12,000 seamen: according to which proportion we lose by the rivalry of the Northern colonies in this single article