active members of Parliament. No private views, no local
interests prevailed. Never were points in trade settled upon a larger
scale of information. They who attended these meetings well know what
ministers they were who heard the most patiently, who comprehended the
most clearly, and who provided the most wisely. Let then this author and
his friends still continue in possession of the practice of exalting
their own abilities, in their pamphlets and in the newspapers. They
never will persuade the public, that the merchants of England were in a
general confederacy to sacrifice their own interests to those of North
America, and to destroy the vent of their own goods in favor of the
manufactures of France and Holland.

Had the friends of this author taken these means of information, his
extreme terrors of contraband in the West India islands would have been
greatly quieted, and his objections to the opening of the ports would
have ceased. He would have learned, from the most satisfactory analysis
of the West India trade, that we have the advantage in every essential
article of it; and that almost every restriction on our communication
with our neighbors there, is a restriction unfavorable to ourselves.

Such were the principles that guided, and the authority that sanctioned,
these regulations. No man ever said, that, in the multiplicity of
regulations made in the administration of their predecessors, none were
useful; some certainly were so; and I defy the author to show a
commercial regulation of that period, which he can prove, from any
authority except his own, to have a tendency beneficial to commerce,
that has been repealed. So far were that ministry from being guided by a
spirit of contradiction or of innovation.

The author's attack on that administration, for their neglect of our
claims on foreign powers, is by much the most astonishing instance he
has given, or that, I believe, any man ever did give, of an intrepid
effrontery. It relates to the Manilla ransom; to the Canada bills; and
to the Russian treaty. Could one imagine, that these very things, which
he thus chooses to object to others, have been the principal subject of
charge against his favorite ministry? Instead of clearing them of these
charges, he appears not so much as to have heard of them; but throws
them directly upon the administration which succeeded to that of his
friends.

It is not always very pleasant to be obliged to produce the detail of