ted opportunity.

To the state of things so far described came the French Revolution;
already begun, indeed, when the committee sat, but the course of which
could not yet be foreseen. Its coincidence with the formation of the
new government of the United States is well to be remembered; for the
two events, by their tendencies, worked together to promote the
antagonism between the United States and Great Britain, which was
already latent in the navigation system of the one and the maritime
aptitudes of the other. Washington, the first American President, was
inaugurated in March, 1789; in May, the States General of France met.
In February, 1793, the French Republic declared war against Great
Britain, and in March Washington entered on his second term. In the
intervening four years the British Government had persisted in
maintaining the exclusion of American carrying trade from her colonial
ports. During the same period the great French colony Santo Domingo
had undergone a social convulsion, which ended in the wreck of its
entire industrial system by the disappearance of slavery, and with it
of all white government. The huge sugar and coffee product of the
island vanished as a commercial factor, and with it the greater part
of the colonial carriage of supplies, which had indemnified American
shippers and agriculturists for their exclusion from British ports. Of
167,399 American tonnage entering American ports from the West Indies
in 1790, 101,417 had been from French islands.

The removal of so formidable a competitor as Santo Domingo of course
inured to the advantage of the British sugar and coffee planter, who
was thus more able to bear the burden laid upon him to maintain the
navigation of the empire, by paying a heavy percentage on his
supplies. This, however, was not the only change in conditions
affecting commerce and navigation. By 1793 it had become evident that
Canada, Nova Scotia, and their neighbors, could not fill the place in
an imperial system which it had been hoped they would take, as
producers of lumber and food stuffs. This increased the relative
importance of the West India Islands to the empire, just when the rise
in price of sugar and coffee made it more desirable to develop their
production. Should war come, the same reason would make it expedient
to extend by conquest British productive territory in the Caribbean,
and at the same time to cut off the supplies of such enemy's
possessions as could no