British ship to make its usual
voyages. The edicts touched the commercial Bostonians in their pockets,
and stimulated them to give to the Revolution that countenance and support
of the "business classes" which revolutionary movements are apt to lack,
and lacking which, are apt to fail.

The war, of course, left the fisheries crippled and almost destroyed. It
had been a struggle between the greatest naval power of the world, and a
loose coalition of independent colonies, without a navy and without a
centralized power to build and maintain one. Massachusetts did, indeed,
equip an armed ship to protect her fishermen, but partly because the
protection was inadequate, and partly as a result of the superior
attractions of privateering, the fishing boats were gradually laid up,
until scarcely enough remained in commission to supply the demands of the
home merchant for fish. Where there had been prosperity and bustle about
wharves, and fish-houses, there succeeded idleness and squalor.
Shipbuilding was prostrate, commerce was dead. The sailors returned to the
farms, shipped on the privateers, or went into Washington's army. But when
peace was declared, they flocked to their boats, and began to rebuild
their shattered industry. Marblehead, which went into the war with 12,000
tons of shipping, came out with 1500. Her able-bodied male citizens had
decreased in numbers from 1200 to 500. Six hundred of her sons, used to
hauling the seine and baiting the trawl, were in British prisons. How many
from this and other fishing ports were pressed against their will into
service on British men-of-war, history has no figures to show; but there
were hundreds. Yet, prostrate as the industry was, it quickly revived, and
soon again attained those noble proportions that had enabled Edmund Burke
to say of it, in defending the colonies before the House of Commons:

"No ocean but what is vexed with their fisheries; no climate that is not
witness of their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the
activity of France, nor the dextrous and firm sagacity of English
enterprise ever carried this perilous mode of hardy enterprise to the
extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people--a people who are
still, as it were, in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of
manhood."

In 1789, immediately upon the formation of the Government under which we
now live, the system of giving bounties to the deep-sea fishermen was
inaugurated