colonial regulation; but the
capacity of the Americans as carriers rested upon natural conditions
not so easy to overcome. The difficulty of the problem was increased
by the fact that the governments of the world generally were awaking
to the disproportionate advantages Great Britain had been reaping from
them for more than a century, during which they had listlessly
acquiesced in her aggressive absorption of the carriage of the seas.
America could count upon their sympathies, and possible co-operation,
in her rivalry with the British carrier. "It is manifest," wrote Coxe
in 1794, "that a prodigious and almost universal revolution in the
views of nations has taken place with regard to the carrying trade."
When John Adams spoke of the United States retaliating upon Great
Britain, by enacting a similar measure of its own, the minister of
Portugal, then a country of greater weight than now, replied: "Not a
nation in Europe would suffer a Navigation Act to be made by any other
at this day. That of England was made in times of ignorance, when few
nations cultivated commerce, and no country but she understood or
cared anything about it, but now all courts are attentive to it;"[37]
so much so, indeed, that it has been said this was the age of
commercial treaties. It was the age also of commercial regulation,
often mistaken and injurious, which found its ideals largely in the
Navigation Act of Great Britain, and in the resultant extraordinary
processes of minute and comprehensive interference, with every species
of commerce, and every article of export or import; for, while the
general principles of the Navigation Act were few and simple enough,
in application they entailed a watchful and constant balancing of
advantages by the Board of Trade, and a consequent manipulation of the
course of commerce,--a perfectly idealized and sublimated protection.
The days of its glory, however, were passing fast. Great Britain was
now in the position of one who has been first to exploit a great
invention, upon which he has an exclusive patent. Others were now
entering the field, and she must prepare for competition, in which she
most of all feared those of her own blood, the children of her loins;
for the signs of the menacing conditions following the War of
Independence had been apparent some time before the revolt of the
colonies gained for them liberty of action, heretofore checked in
favor of the mother country. In these conditions, and in