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BRITISH COLONIAL POLICY
building industry. That the Navigation Ordinance of the Interregnum led to the measure of 1660 is undoubted. But that, in itself, it contained the full mischief of the Mercantile system, cannot be fairly maintained. The object against which the measure was directed was the naval supremacy of Holland ; and it is by its success or failure in wresting the carrying trade from the hands of the Dutch that it must be judged. The opinion of the men of the Commonwealth with regard to the Dutch may be recognized in the words of Thomas Mun, who has been generally recognized as the earliest English exponent of that Mercantile system, which for so long dominated in the fields of practice and of thought. Anticipating the views of the next generation, we find him, as early as about 1628, 1 breaking through the chains of political and religious prejudice and boldly asserting that England’s true enemy was not the Spaniards or the French, but the Dutch, 2 “ who undermine, hurt, and eclipse us daily in our Navigation and Trade.”
The Navigation Acts have been generally condemned by modern economists, as having neither conduced to the naval nor commercial greatness of England, but this seems a difficult thesis to maintain in the face of the well-attested fact that the carrying trade of England was, before their enactment, in the hands of the Dutch, and that afterwards, though of course not at once or at one bound, England became the great carrier of Europe. The secret of the success of the Dutch in the carrying trade lay in the greater cheapness with which they were able to transport goods. This was owing to the fact that they were able to build ships at a less cost and to navigate them with a smaller crew. The Navigation Acts gave the English the opportunity to make good the lost ground. To say that because the English mercantile marine has never flourished so much as since the repeal of the Navigation Acts, therefore these Acts must have been useless, is as though one should call crutches needless, because a man who is no longer lame can walk better without them. The
1 England's Treasure by Forraign Trade, pub. 1664, but written much earlier,
s 1895 ed., p. iu.