Before the peace of 1783, the writings of Adam Smith had gravely shaken belief in the mercantile system of extraordinary trade regulation and protection as conducive to national prosperity. Though undermined, however, it had not been overthrown; and even to doubters there remained the exception, which Smith himself admitted, of the necessity to protect navigation as a nursery for the navy, and consequently as a fundamental means of national defence. Existence takes precedence of prosperity; the life is more than the meat. Commercial regulation, though unfitted to increase wealth, could be justified as a means to promote ship-building; to retain ship-builders in the country; to husband the raw materials of their work; to force the transport of merchandise in British-built ships and by British seamen; and thus to induce capital to invest, and men to embark their lives, in maritime trade, to the multiplication of ships and seamen, the chief dependence of the nation in war. "Keeping ships for freight," said Sheffield, "is not the most profitable branch of trade. It is necessary, for the sake of our marine, to force or encourage it by exclusive advantages." "Comparatively with the number of our people and the extent of our country, we are doomed almost always to wage unequal war; and as a means of raising seamen it cannot be too often repeated that it is not possible to be too jealous on the head of navigation." He proceeds then at once to draw the distinction between the protection of navigation and that of commerce generally. "This jealousy should not be confounded with that towards neighboring countries as to trade and manufactures; nor is the latter jealousy in many instances reasonable or well founded. Competition is useful, forcing our manufacturers to act fairly, and to work reasonably." Sheffield was the most conspicuous, and probably the most influential, of the controversialists on this side of the question at this period; the interest of the public is shown by his pamphlet passing through six editions in a twelvemonth. He was, however, far from singular in this view. Chalmers, a writer of much research, said likewise: "In these considerations of nautical force and public safety we discover the fundamental principle of Acts of Navigation, which, though established in opposition to domestic and foreign clamors, have produced so great an augmentation of our native shipping and sailors, and which therefore should not be sacrificed to any projects of private gain,"—that is, of commercial advantage. "There are intelligent persons who suggest that the imposing of alien duties on alien ships, rather than on alien merchandise, would augment our naval strength."59
Colonies therefore were esteemed desirable to this end chiefly. To use the expression of a French officer,60 they were the fruitful nursery of seamen. French writers of that day considered their West India islands the chief nautical support of the state. But in order to secure this, it was necessary to exercise complete control of their trade inward and outward; of the supplies they needed as well as of the products they raised, and especially to confine the carriage of both to national shipping. "The only use and advantage of the (remaining) American colonies61 or West India islands to Great Britain," says Sheffield, "are the monopoly of their consumption and the carriage of their produce. It is the advantage to our navigation which in any degree countervails the enormous expense of protecting our islands. Rather than give up their carrying trade it would be better to give up themselves." The entrepôt system herein found additional justification, for not only did it foster navigation by the homeward voyage, confined to British ships, and extort toll in transit, but the re-exportation made a double voyage which was more than doubly fruitful in seamen; for from the nearness of the British Islands to the European continent, which held the great body of consumers, this second carriage could be done, and actually was done, by numerous small vessels, able to bear a short voyage but not to brave an Atlantic passage. Economically, trade by many small vessels is more expensive than by a few large, because for a given aggregate tonnage it requires many more men; but this economical loss was thought to be more than compensated by the political gain in multiplying seamen. It was estimated in 1795 that there was a difference of from thirty-five to forty men in carrying the same quantity of goods in one large or ten small vessels. This illustrates aptly the theory of the Navigation Act, which sought wealth indeed, but, as then understood, subordinated that consideration distinctly to the superior need of increasing the resources of the country in ships and seamen. Moreover, the men engaged in these short voyages were more immediately at hand for impressment in war, owing to the narrow range of their expeditions and their frequent returns to home ports.
In 1783, therefore, the Navigation Act had become in general acceptance a measure not merely commercial, but military. It was defended chiefly as essential to the naval power of Great Britain, which rested upon the sure foundation of maritime resources thus laid. Nor need this view excite derision to-day, for it compelled then the adhesion of an American who of all in his time was most adverse to the general commercial policy of Great Britain. In a report on the subject made to Congress in 1793, by Jefferson, as Secretary of State, he said: "Our navigation involves still higher considerations than our commerce. As a branch of industry it is valuable, but as a resource of defence essential. It will admit neither neglect nor forbearance. The position and circumstances of the United States leave them nothing to fear on their land-board; … but on their seaboard they are open to injury, and they have there too a commerce (coasting) which must be protected. This can only be done by possessing a respectable body of citizen-seamen, and of artists and establishments in readiness for ship-building."62 The limitations of Jefferson's views appear here clearly, in the implicit relegation of defence, not to a regular and trained navy, but to the occasional unskilled efforts of a distinctly civil force; but no stronger recognition of the necessities of Great Britain could be desired, for her nearness to the great military states of the world deprived her land-board of the security which the remoteness of the United States assured. With such stress laid upon the vital importance of merchant seamen to national safety, it is but a step in thought to perceive how inevitable was the jealousy and indignation felt in Great Britain, when she found her fleets, both commercial and naval, starving for want of seamen, who had sought refuge from war in the American merchant service, and over whom the American Government, actually weak and but yesterday vassal, sought to extend its protection from impressment.
Up to the War of American Independence, the singular geographical situation of Great Britain, inducing her to maritime enterprise and exempting her from territorial warfare, with the financial and commercial pre-eminence she had then maintained for three-fourths of a century, gave her peculiar advantages for enforcing a policy which until that time had thriven conspicuously, if somewhat illusively, in its commercial results, and had substantially attained its especial object of maritime preponderance. Other peoples had to submit to the compulsion exerted by her overweening superiority. The obligation upon foreign shipping to be three-fourths manned by their own citizens, for instance, rested only upon a British law, and applied only in a British port; but the accumulations of British capital, with the consequent facility for mercantile operations and ability to extend credits, the development of British manufactures, the extent of the British carrying trade, the enforced storage of colonial products in British territory, with the correlative obligation that foreign goods for her numerous and increasing colonists must first be brought to her shores and thence transshipped,—all these circumstances made the British islands a centre for export and import, towards which foreign shipping was unavoidably drawn and so brought under the operation of the law. The nation had so far out-distanced competition that her supremacy was unassailable, and remained unimpaired for a century longer. To it had contributed powerfully the economical distribution of her empire, greatly diversified in particulars, yet symmetrical in the capacity of one part to supply what the other lacked. There was in the whole a certain self-sufficingness, resembling that claimed in this age for the United States, with its compact territory