as their rival, and the most dangerous rival they have in the world. I
can see clearly they are less afraid of the augmentation of French
ships and sailors than American. They think they foresee that if the
United States had the same fisheries, carrying trade, and same market
for ready-built ships, they had ten years ago, they would be in so
respectable a position, and in so happy circumstances, that British
seamen, manufacturers, and merchants too, would hurry over to
them."[70] These statements, drawn from Adams's association with many
men, reflect so exactly the line of argument in the best known of the
many controversial pamphlets published about that time,--Lord
Sheffield's "Observations on the Commerce of the American States,"--as
to prove that it represented correctly a preponderant popular feeling,
not only adverse to the restoration of the colonial privileges
contemplated by Pitt, but distinctly inimical to the new nation; a
feeling born of past defeat and of present apprehension.

Inextricably associated with this feeling was the conviction that the
navigation supported by the sugar islands, being a monopoly always
under the control of the mother country, and ministering to the
_entrepot_ on which so much other shipping depended, was the one sure
support of the general carrying trade of the nation. "Considering the
bulk of West India commodities," Sheffield had written, "and the
universality and extent of the consumption of sugar, a consumption
still in its infancy even in Europe, and still more in America, it is
not improbable that in a few ages the nation which may be in
possession of the most extensive and best cultivated sugar islands,
_subject to a proper policy_,[71] will take the lead at sea." Men of
all schools concurred in this general view, which is explanatory of
much of the course pursued by the British Government, alike in
military enterprise, commercial regulation, and political belligerent
measures, during the approaching twenty years of war with France. It
underlay Pitt's subsequent much derided, but far from unwise, care to
get the whole West India region under British control, by conquering
its sugar islands. It underlay also the other measures, either
instituted or countenanced by him, or inherited from his general war
policy, which led through ever increasing exasperation to the war with
the United States. The question, however, remained, "What is the
proper policy conducive to the end whic