sh vessels, if
these should engage in the traffic between the American continent and
the islands. Similarly, freedom to export colonial produce was granted
to American bottoms from the West Indies to the United States. Both
exports and imports, thus to be authorized, were to be "liable to the
same duties and charges only as the same merchandise would be subject
to, if it were the property of British native-born subjects, and
imported in British ships, navigated by British seamen."[66] In short,
while the primary purpose doubtless was the benefit of the islands,
the effect of the measure, as regarded the West India trade, was to
restore the citizens of the now independent states to the privileges
they had enjoyed as colonists. The carrying trade between the islands
and the continent was conceded to them, and past experience gave
ground to believe it would be by them absorbed.

It was over this concession that the storm of controversy arose and
raged, until the outbreak of the French Revolution, by the
conservative reaction it provoked in other governments, arrested for
the time any change of principle in regard to colonial administration,
whatever modifications might from time to time be induced by momentary
exigencies of policy. The question immediately argued was probably on
all hands less one of principle than of expediency. Superior as
commercial prosperity and the preservation of peace were to most other
motives in the interest of Pitt's mind, he doubtless would have
admitted, along with his most earnest opponents, that the fostering of
the national carrying trade, as a nursery to the navy and so
contributory to national defence, took precedence of purely commercial
legislation. With all good-will to America, his prime object
necessarily was the welfare of Great Britain; but this he, contrary to
the mass of public opinion, conceived to lie in the restoration of the
old intercourse between the two peoples, modified as little as
possible by the new condition of independence. He trusted that the
habit of receiving everything from England, the superiority of British
manufactures, a common tongue, and commercial correspondences only
temporarily interrupted by the war, would tend to keep the new states
customers of Great Britain chiefly, as they had been before; and what
they bought they must pay for by sending their own products in return.
This constraint of routine and convenience received additional force
from the sca