which it was constantly drained by English merchants in the operations of trade. Sir Robert Walpole said he supposed that if the colonies should gain £500,000 in trade, half of it would, in two years, pass by indirect channels into the English exchequer. 1

The position of the colonies in the eighteenth century in their financial relations with England was very similar to that of the Western American States to the Eastern financial centres from 1850 to about 1900. In that half-century, roughly speaking, the building of cities and railways and the bringing of the land under cultivation made the West heavily indebted to the East; money at ruinous rates of interest was lent by the East to these Western pioneers, who had to struggle against adverse conditions and suffer much hardship; who saw their crops destroyed by blight and the elements, but the interest payments on their mortgages must be met or they would be sold out by "the bank," a thousand miles away; and "the bank" was as soulless, as impersonal, and as inexorable as Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. The West came to have for the East much the same feeling that the colonies had for England; they were slaving for a bare existence so that their creditors might grow rich from the profits of their labor; this feeling gave rise to the same resentment that every man in debt has for his creditor; it was one of the reasons, as we shall see, that gave the West a view of life different from that of the East. In the colonies at the time of the Revolution, as in the West a century later, the means existed to create wealth, and although no man could foresee the enormous potential resources of the continent, its riches, both in England and America, were vaguely understood.

Between 1700 and 1760, the value of property in England increased fifty per cent, and Pitt declared this was wholly due to the American colonies.1 In 1776, he said, "The profit of Great Britain from the trade of the colonies is two millions a year. This is the fund that carried you triumphantly through the last war. You owe this to America." Burke told the House of Commons that for some time past the Old World had been fed from the New, and he gave in striking form the value of the American trade to England. In 1704, the export trade of England to the colonies stood at £569,930; in 1772, it had grown to £6,023,132. Even more impressive is his further statement that in 1704 the whole export trade of England, including the colonies, was valued at £6,509,000, while in 1772 the colonial exports alone amounted to £6,024,000. "When we speak of the commerce with our colonies," he said, "fiction lags after truth; invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren." 2 Whence came these great sources of wealth which so immensely added to the prosperity of the Empire? Burke has told of the bounty of Nature which enabled the New World to feed the Old, and he found other mines. From the beginning of time the sea has always nourished its people, and the skill and audacious courage with which the colonists pursued their fisheries excited the envy of England. The men of New England, in Burke's high-sounding phrase, carried on the whale fishery "among the tumbling mountains of ice," they penetrated "into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits; whilst we are looking for them beneath the Arctic Circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the South. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils." 1

2

Spurred by necessity, the men of New England had early taken to the sea. Massachusetts reached out slowly from the seaboard, and it was not until about 1725 that she began to colonize the Berkshire Hills. It was this leisurely control of the hinterland that forced her people out on the sea and made them a maritime race and the ocean carriers of the colonies. "Boston alone in 1664 had three hundred boats fishing in the waters about Cape Sable; and there were fifteen hundred fishermen casting their nets off the Isles of Shoals. Cod became the staple of New England exports. Salted and packed, it found a ready and extensive market.1 The choicest fish were sent to the Catholic countries of southern Europe, where the regular fastdays occasioned a steady demand, just as they had done in the fifteenth century for the salt herring of the great Hanse fisheries." 2 In three years, from 1714 to 1717, there cleared from Boston for the West Indies 518 vessels; the total number of clearances from Boston to all ports in that period was 1247 vessels, employing 8697 men; from the less important port of Salem 232 vessels sailed. prodigious strides made by the sea-borne commerce of the colonies is shown by an account of entrances and clearances for 1760.4 In that year there entered all the ports of the colonies from British and foreign ports a total of 3044 vessels, with an aggregate of 188,562 tons; there cleared to British and foreign ports 3523 vessels, having a tonnage of 201,613. The British policy, which restricted the carryingtrade to British or colonial vessels, was of enormous advantage to the shipping interests on both sides

The of the Atlantic and encouraged the building of ships in the colonies; an industry for which they were peculiarly favored owing to their timber and naval stores.1 So important did this industry become that in 1724 the ship carpenters of the Thames complained to the King that their trade was hurt and their workmen emigrated, since so many vessels were built in New England. Massachusetts built ships not only for England, but also for European countries and the West Indies.2

The year 1760 was one of the years of war between England and France. The French West Indian Islands produced almost nothing but sugar, and had to rely on the American colonies for food. This trade was illegal, but for fifty years it had been permitted to go on unchecked, and it became so profitable that even in time of war it could not be suppressed, as men were willing to sacrifice their patriotism for the sake of swelling their purse.3 How great the gains were from this illicit commerce is shown by an English author of that year, who declares that a cargo of cotton, linen, and woolen

1 Weeden: Economic and Social History of New England, vol. 1, p. 364.

2 Beer: The Commercial Policy of England toward the American Colonies, p. 156.

• Vessels sailing under flags of truce were licensed to go to the French West Indies, nominally to exchange prisoners, actually to engage in contraband trade. These licenses were issued by the colonial governors, who knew what they were worth, and exacted full price. Francis Fauquier, lieutenant-governor of Virginia, according to Burnaby, was one of the few governors who refused to issue these permits, although on one occasion Fauquier was offered £200 for a permit for a single voyage.

Travels through

North America, p. 73.