nds for many decades before the
founding of Jamestown, seemed to have proved delusive. The colonies
were developing interests and commercial connections hostile to those of
the mother country, were nourishing the manufactures and shipping of
foreign nations almost as much as those of England. And this the
Government at London would not tolerate. The colonial trade with
strangers must come to an end. If Virginia and Maryland produced more
tobacco than the English market could absorb, they could find ready
relief by turning their energies into other channels. Let them furnish
the old country with pig iron or potash or silk or ship-stores and they
would find ready and eager purchasers. So reasoned the English, and as
their views were backed by the mandates of Crown and Parliament, the
colonists were forced to submit. If they could fit themselves into the
system prescribed for them, all would be well and good; if they found
this impossible, they would have to suffer without hope of redress.

And suffer Virginia did for a full quarter of a century. The tobacco of
the Chesapeake bay colonies had long since reached the point where it
required a world market. If confined to England alone, only a fraction
of the output could be consumed and disaster was certain. It was well
enough for the Government to restrict the importation of Spanish leaf
and to prohibit the planting of tobacco in England, these regulations
could do no more than give the colonists undisputed possession of the
home market, and the home market was not enough. This point seems to
have been ignored by those writers who have contended that the strict
enforcement of the British colonial system in itself entailed no
hardship upon the tobacco colonies.

"It is obvious that any criticism of England's regulation of the
colonial tobacco trade, which is based on a laissez-faire social
philosophy," says George Lewis Beer, in _The Old Colonial System_, "is
equally applicable to the arrangement by means of which the tobacco
planter secured exclusive privileges in the home market."[5-1] Yet it is
certain that the tobacco growers of England could never have competed
with Maryland and Virginia had there been free trade. The prohibition of
planting in the old country was necessary only because of the tariff,
varying from 200 per cent in 1660 to 600 per cent in 1705, upon the
colonial product. And though the exclusion of Spanish tobacco was a more
real benefit, for the Spaniar