course of the export and
import trade of the now United States. It remained to try whether
there did not exist, nevertheless, the ability effectually to control
it to the advantage of British navigation, as above defined. "Our
remaining colonies on the Continent, and the West India Islands," it
was argued, "with the favorable state of English manufactures, may
still give us almost exclusively the trade of America;" provided these
circumstances were suitably utilized, and their advantages rigorously
enforced, where power to do so still remained, as it did in the West
Indies.

Although by far the stronger and more flourishing part of her
colonial dominions had been wrested from Great Britain, there yet
remained to her upon the continent, in Canada and the adjacent
provinces, a domain great in area, and in the West India Islands
another of great productiveness. Whatever wisdom had been learned as
regards the political treatment of colonies, the views as to the
nature of their economical utility to the mother country, and their
consequent commercial regulation, had undergone no enlargement, but
rather had been intensified in narrowness and rigor by the loss of so
valuable a part of the whole. No counteractive effect to this
prepossession was to be found in contemporary opinion in Europe. The
French Revolution itself, subversive as it was of received views in
many respects, was at the first characterized rather by an
exaggeration of the traditional exclusive policy of the eighteenth
century relating to colonies, shipping, and commerce. In America, the
unsettled commercial and financial conditions which succeeded the
peace, the divergence of interests between the several new states, the
feebleness of the confederate government, its incompetency to deal
assuredly with external questions, and lack of all power to regulate
commerce, inspired a conviction in Great Britain that the continent
could not offer strong, continued resistance to commercial aggression,
carried on under the peaceful form of municipal regulation. It was
generally thought that the new states could never unite, but instead
would drift farther apart.

The belief was perfectly reasonable; a gift of prophecy only could
have foretold the happy result, of which many of the most prominent
Americans for some time despaired. "It will not be an easy matter,"
wrote Lord Sheffield,[55] "to bring the American States to act as a
nation; they are not to be feared as suc