ot fallacious. In
matters of account, however, this want of care is not excusable; and the
difference between neutral nations entirely engrossing our navigation,
and being only subsidiary to a vastly augmented trade, makes a most
material difference to his argument. From that principle of fairness,
though the author speaks otherwise, I am willing to suppose he means no
more than that our navigation had so declined as to alarm us with the
probable loss of this valuable object. I shall however show, that his
whole proposition, whatever modifications he may please to give it, is
without foundation; that our navigation had not decreased; that, on the
contrary, it had greatly increased in the war; that it had increased by
the war; and that it was probable the same cause would continue to
augment it to a still greater height; to what an height it is hard to
say, had our success continued.

But first I must observe, I am much less solicitous whether his fact be
true or no, than whether his principle is well established. Cases are
dead things, principles are living and productive. I affirm then, that,
if in time of war our trade had the good fortune to increase, and at the
same time a large, nay the largest, proportion of carriage had been
engrossed by neutral nations, it ought not in itself to have been
considered as a circumstance of distress. War is a time of inconvenience
to trade; in general it must be straitened, and must find its way as it
can. It is often happy for nations that they are able to call in neutral
navigation. They all aim at it. France endeavored at it, but could not
compass it. Will this author say, that, in a war with Spain, such an
assistance would not be of absolute necessity? that it would not be the
most gross of all follies to refuse it?

In the next place, his method of stating a medium of six years of war,
and six years of peace, to decide this question, is altogether unfair.
To say, in derogation of the advantages of a war, that navigation is not
equal to what it was in time of peace, is what hitherto has never been
heard of. No war ever bore that test but the war which he so bitterly
laments. One may lay it down as a maxim, that an average estimate of an
object in a steady course of rising or of falling, must in its nature be
an unfair one; more particularly if the cause of the rise or fall be
visible, and its continuance in any degree probable. Average estimates
are never just but when the obje