r seaboard they are open to
injury, and they have there too a commerce (coasting) which must be
protected. This can only be done by possessing a respectable body of
citizen-seamen, and of artists and establishments in readiness for
ship-building."[62] The limitations of Jefferson's views appear here
clearly, in the implicit relegation of defence, not to a regular and
trained navy, but to the occasional unskilled efforts of a distinctly
civil force; but no stronger recognition of the necessities of Great
Britain could be desired, for her nearness to the great military
states of the world deprived her land-board of the security which the
remoteness of the United States assured. With such stress laid upon
the vital importance of merchant seamen to national safety, it is but
a step in thought to perceive how inevitable was the jealousy and
indignation felt in Great Britain, when she found her fleets, both
commercial and naval, starving for want of seamen, who had sought
refuge from war in the American merchant service, and over whom the
American Government, actually weak and but yesterday vassal, sought to
extend its protection from impressment.

Up to the War of American Independence, the singular geographical
situation of Great Britain, inducing her to maritime enterprise and
exempting her from territorial warfare, with the financial and
commercial pre-eminence she had then maintained for three-fourths of a
century, gave her peculiar advantages for enforcing a policy which
until that time had thriven conspicuously, if somewhat illusively, in
its commercial results, and had substantially attained its especial
object of maritime preponderance. Other peoples had to submit to the
compulsion exerted by her overweening superiority. The obligation upon
foreign shipping to be three-fourths manned by their own citizens, for
instance, rested only upon a British law, and applied only in a
British port; but the accumulations of British capital, with the
consequent facility for mercantile operations and ability to extend
credits, the development of British manufactures, the extent of the
British carrying trade, the enforced storage of colonial products in
British territory, with the correlative obligation that foreign goods
for her numerous and increasing colonists must first be brought to her
shores and thence transshipped,--all these circumstances made the
British islands a centre for export and import, towards which foreign
shippi