an interchange taking place agreeably to trading advantages possessed by the respective countries. The British colonies require, it is said, silks and cottons. The cottons England can produce as cheaply as other nations; the silk she cannot. She ought, therefore, to supply the colony with silk, through France, and pay that country with some of her other products. Were this done, as it is alleged it would be under the free trade system, mutual gain would be obtained, and the end of commerce established. Now it is evident that all this nice balancing of trade may take place, while the quantity of products is diminished. Great Bri tain is not bound to consume 200,000 hogsheads of sugar per annum. Circumstances may arise so that one half the quantity may suffice. The opponents of the colonial system take it for granted that a certain quantity she must have. The reasoning adduced may have created some doubts on the subject, and shewn how consumption will be diminished by domestic causes. If the labouring population be considered the chief consumers, such diminution will, to a certainty, ensue, should a change take place from a system where their high condition can be positively and efficiently maintained to one where they directly compete with labourers not possessing the one-fourth part of the artificial wants of themselves.

It was proper to examine the prominent positions of the free trade advocates in detail; but there is

one mode of putting the general argument, which seems at once and effectually to answer all objections urged against the encouragement of colonial trade.

Great Britain may impose upon her colonies whatever system of commercial policy it is most expedient for her to embrace.

All will allow, that certainty is better than pre cariousness. So long as rivalry and contention exist among states, interruptions must continually arise to their intercourse with each other. Governments of particular countries are prone to imagine, either that they have exclusive advantages at command, or that they can avail themselves of some imagined necessities of their neighbours. We have been so long accustomed to be supplied with tropical produce as regularly as we are with corn, that we rarely think of the consequences that would arise were the supply stopped, from war or other causes. The articles that we now import very extensively from foreign countries are principally the raw material employed in manufactures, in which a rise of price is of trivial consequence.

The value of manufactured cotton may, perhaps, be a hundred times as great as the value of the raw material out of which it is produced. When cotton wool, therefore, rises from 6d. to 3s. or 4s. a pound, as it did during the American war, the enhancement of price in the manufactured articles is comparatively little felt; but were such rise to

take place in sugar, the article would be beyond the reach of the great mass of consumers. An extensive branch of trade would be greatly reduced, many men must be thrown out of employment, and the sufferings of all directly and indirectly engaged in that branch must entail great injury generally on the nation. It would be impolitic and unstatesman-like to omit so material a consideration in judging of the advantages of importing tropical produce from British settlements, instead of foreign countries. If war be sometimes unavoidable, it is surely wise to diminish its evils.

One more peculiarity remains to be noticed. Commerce is dependent upon habits, customs, and fashions: a colony is at all times disposed to imitate those of the parent state in their most minute particulars; an independent state feels some pride in rejecting them for fashions of its own. Were English customs disseminated all over the globe, it is evident that a prodigiously increased demand for manufactures must ensue. Abridge the opportunities for disseminating those customs, abridge the foreign dependencies of Great Britain, and you circumscribe the exertions of British industry. To assume society in different nations to have certain wants unmodified by circumstances, or uninfluenced by example, indicates but little experience of mankind, and would constitute a charge of unpardonable ignorance against the practical legislator, destined to preside over the commerce

of a great trading nation. Certain proportions must uniformly exist between the imports and exports of a country. If the wants of the nation with whom you traffic be diminished, or, what is the same thing, if you take away her disposition to imitate your fashions, the proportions are disarranged, and the intercourse will become less. In dependencies owning allegiance to the British crown, this intercourse has a tendency to increase and to extend its influence to adjacent parts. In foreign countries it decreases as the arts and civilization advance. A new hat or coat of the latest London fashion is

sought for in the one: in the latter, those articles are fabricated within the inde pendent country herself, or they may be of the most approved shape of Amsterdam or Paris.

SECTION III.

Political Power augmented.

NATIONS will never command political influence among their neighbours from the mere boast of good government or love of justice, unless, at the same time, they be possessed of physical strength. Great Britain is known to be a great maritime power; and it is the consciousness that she can, at any time, with comparative ease, strike upon distant territories with impunity, that foreign

governments yield attention and deference to her councils. The number of her seamen förms the ele ments of that power, of which the colonies supply a most material part. The tonnage which cleared outwards from Great Britain, for her distant possessions, for the year ending 5th January, 1827, was as follows:

There are, besides, upwards of 65,000 tons engaged in trade between British North America and the West Indies, forming a general total greater than that possessed by most states in Europe.

It is quite notorious, that almost the whole of the American trade is conducted in American shipping; and since the relaxation of the navigation laws in favour of the northern European powers, the number of their shipping has increased in a ratio to alarm the ship-owners of Great Britain. On the loss of our colonies, therefore, we ought to calculate on losing the seamen employed in their trade.

But the writers who have pronounced condemnation on our colonial policy, while they broadly admit that we must lose our best seamen, argue, that our political power will sustain no injury. It is a very cumbersome and roundabout method, it is contended, to raise seamen for the navy by means of mercantile shipping. It would be much better