olitical reasons) took elaborate shape in the Navigation Acts,
designed to secure for English vessels a monopoly of the carrying
trade between England and all other countries which sent goods to
English or to colonial shores. This policy was supported by a network
of minor measures giving bounties to our colonies for the exportation
of shipping materials, pitch, tar, hemp, turpentine, masts, and spars,
and giving bounties at home for the construction of defensible ships.
This Navigation policy gave a strong foundational support to the whole
protective policy. Probably the actuating motives of this policy were
more political than industrial. Holland, the first to apply this
method systematically, had immensely strengthened her maritime power.
France, though less successfully, had followed in her wake. Doubtless
there were many clear-thinking Englishmen who, though aware of the
damage done to commerce by our restrictive regulations about shipping,
held that the maintenance of a powerful navy for the defence of the
kingdom and its foreign possessions was an advantage which outweighed
the damage.[11]

The selfish and short-sighted policy of this protective system found
its culminating point in the treatment of Ireland and the American
plantations. The former was forbidden all manufacture which might
either directly or indirectly compete with English industry, and was
compelled to deal exclusively with England; the American colonies were
forbidden to weave cloth, to make hats, or to forge a bolt, and were
compelled to take all the manufactured goods required for their
consumption from England.

The freedom and expansion of international commerce was further
hampered by the policy of assigning monopolies of colonial and foreign
trade to close Chartered Companies. This policy, however, defensible
as an encouragement of early mercantile adventure, was carried far
beyond these legitimate limits in the eighteenth century. In England
the East Indian was the most powerful and successful of these
companies, but the assignment of the trade with Turkey, Russia, and
other countries to chartered companies was a distinct hindrance to the
development of foreign trade.

Our foreign trade at that period might indeed be classed or graded in
accordance with the degree of encouragement or discouragement offered
by the State.

Imports would fall into four classes.

1. Imports forbidden either (_a_) by legislative prohibition,