mployed. If
France undertakes, solely, the competition against them, she must do
it at equal expense. The trade is too poor to support itself. The
eighty-five ships, necessary to supply even her present consumption,
bountied, as the English are, will require a sacrifice of twelve hundred
and eighty-five thousand two hundred livres a year, to maintain three
thousand five hundred and seventy seamen, and that, a part of the year
only; and if she will put it to twelve thousand men, in competition with
England, she must sacrifice, as they do, four or five millions a year.
The same number of men might, with the same bounty, be kept in as
constant employ, carrying stone from Bayonne to Cherburg, or coal from
Newcastle to Havre, in which navigations they would be always at
hand, and become as good seamen. The English consider among their best
sailors, those employed to carry coal from Newcastle to London. France
cannot expect to raise her fishery, even to the supply of her own
consumption, in one year, or in several years. Is it not better, then,
by keeping her ports open to the United States, to enable them to aid in
maintaining the field against the common adversary, till she shall be in
condition to take it herself, and to supply her own wants? Otherwise her
supplies must aliment that very force, which is keeping her under. On
our part, we can never be dangerous competitors to France. The extent
to which we can exercise this fishery, is limited to that of the barren
island of Nantucket, and a few similar barren spots; its duration, to
the pleasure of this government, as we have no other market. A material
observation must be added here: sudden vicissitudes of opening and
shutting ports, do little injury to merchants settled on the opposite
coast, watching for the opening, like the return of a tide, and ready to
enter with it. But they ruin the adventurer, whose distance requires six
months' notice. Those who are now arriving from America, in consequence
of the Arret of December the 29th, will consider it as the false light
which has led them to their ruin. They will be apt to say, that they
come to the ports of France by invitation of that _Arret_, that the
subsequent one of September the 28th, which drives them from those
ports, founds itself on a single principle, viz. 'that the prohibition
of foreign oils is the most useful encouragement which can be given
to that branch of industry.' They will say, that, if this be a true