equality of treatment, as to duties and
tonnage, towards the ships of both nations in the home ports of each
other. "But if Congress should propose (as they certainly will) that
this principle of equality should be extended to the ports of our
Colonies and Islands, and that the ships of the United States should
there be treated as British ships, it should be answered that this
demand cannot be admitted even as a subject of negotiation.... This
branch of freight is of the same nature with the freight from one
American state to another" (that is, trade internal to the empire is
essentially a coasting trade). "Congress has made regulations to
confine the freight, employed between the different states, to the
ships of the United States, and Great Britain does not object to this
restriction."[100] "The great advantages which have resulted from
excluding American ships appear in the accounts given in this report;
many of the merchants and planters of the West Indies, who formerly
resisted this advice, now acknowledge the wisdom of it."[101]

The committee recognized that exclusion from the carrying trade of the
British West Indies was in some degree compensated to the American
carrier, by the permission given by the Government of France for
vessels not exceeding sixty tons to trade with her colonies, actually
much greater producers, and therefore larger customers. Santo Domingo
in particular, in the period following the American war, had enjoyed a
heyday of prosperity, far eclipsing that of all the British islands
together. This was due partly to natural advantages, and partly to
social conditions,--the planters being generally resident, which the
British were not; but cheaper supplies through free intercourse with
the American continent also counted for much. From the French West
Indies there entered the United States in 1790, 101,417 tons of
shipping, of which only 3,925 were French.[102] From the British
Islands there came 90,375, but of these all but 4,057 were
British.[103] Returning, the exports from the United States to the two
were respectively, $3,284,656 and $2,077,757.[104] The flattering
testimony borne by these figures to the meagreness of French
navigation, in the particular quarter, needed doubtless to be
qualified by reference to their home trade from the West Indies, borne
in French ships. This amounted in 1788 to 296,435 tons from Santo
Domingo alone;[105] whereas the British trade from all their islands
e