the resolution of England to depend upon her own people instead of courting foreign aid by legislative measures, combined with the exclusion of foreign shipping from her rapidly-increasing colonial trade, had more to do with these changes than the other combined reasons which the political economists of various ages have assigned.
The colonial system.
Partial anomalies.
Capital created,
By what was known as the "Colonial System,"
Great Britain secured not merely the exclusive
carrying trade of all produce derived from her own
plantations, but she exercised the monopoly of supplying
them from this side of the Atlantic with
such articles as they required or could afford to
consume, while sharing in the carrying trade and
commerce of those parts of the world to which she
had access in common with other maritime states.
Many anomalies and some positive self-injuries,
however, sprang out of this exclusive system, which
of late years have been exposed in all their deformities.
But it cannot be disputed, that whatever
flagrant evils the exclusive colonial system engendered
it was upon the whole one which tended
materially to develop the maritime energies of British
shipowners; and the rapidity with which the colonies
in the West Indian Archipelago and on the continent
of America rose to importance both in wealth and
population, demonstrates that though not so advantageous
as it otherwise might have been, it was
certainly not as disastrous to the colonists as partial
American historians would have us believe. There
may at first have existed a paucity of sufficient
capital and a deficiency of English ships to carry on
with the fullest advantage the trade thus created;
