THE BOUNTY POLICY 577 benefits which would arise from greater freedom of trade, their opponents were wedded to the idea of regulation. There was, they alleged, a certainty of a heavy adverse balance if the suggested commercial treaty was ratified. Joshua Gee, who was prominent in supporting the opposition, afterwards restated his conviction that "France, above all other nations, is the worst for England to trade with: it produces most things necessary for life, and wants very little either for luxury or convenience..."; supplying her own requirements and having a large population and therefore cheap labour, she could, it was insisted, successfully invade the British market and deprive the country of its treasure. Consequently it was essential in the national interest to restrict trade with France and to find outlets elsewhere. The desire to avoid unfavourable balances with particular countries led to the conception of a self-contained Empire, each part making its contribution to the development of the whole. The course of trade was to be turned to the British colonies in America and diverted from the natural channels which caused it to flow towards the Baltic, France and other foreign countries. In this way it was supposed that all the advantages of trade would be conserved, no foreign country being able to gain any advantages on the balance. The defeat of the Tory policy in 1713 placed upon the Board of Trade the responsibility of working out the details of such a scheme. It was a formidable task. The merchants who had become prominent in the controversy regarding the proposed commercial treaty were constantly consulted about the best course to take. They naturally recommended that the encouragement given to the production of naval stores should be maintained. In 1713 the principle of granting bounties on colonial produce was extended for a further period, but the enthusiasts found that the policy was not generally acceptable. The Admiralty criticised the quality of the colonial products, the Treasury was alarmed at the expense involved, and the Eastland merchants were naturally anxious to maintain the Baltic trade. To meet the attacks on the quality it was agreed that the Custom House officers should have the right to open and test barrels of tar and pitch before granting the certificate for the payment of the bounty. As to the cost to the Treasury, William Wood argued "we ought not to regard the expense of any present encouragement at first, when we consider the future advantages and security, not only of our trade and navigation, but of all His Majesty's dominions: and 'tis most certain, whatever shall be paid the northern colonies as a bounty at first to enter heartily and cheerfully upon the doing of this will not be lost to the nation, but still remain with us; which cannot be said of what we pay to the East Country (over and above what they take from us in manufactures) which... amounts to about £200,000 a year, and 5 Geo. I, cap. 2, secs. 16 and 17. 37 1 Gee, p. 14. CHBEI 2 12 Anne, cap. 9. 3 3 would be so much saved to the nation, could we have the same from our own people". Joshua Gee in his Trade and Navigation of Great Britain considered gives some account of the enquiries conducted by the Board of Trade immediately after the Peace of 1713. He was consulted and asked to commit his recommendations to writing; and in the memorandum he prepared he sketched an ambitious programme. He wished to see the production of tar and pitch further encouraged, iron obtained from the colonies, and large ships built suitable for the timber trade.2 The members of the Board, he says, were favourable to his proposals, but he was disappointed with the attitude of the House of Commons, where "very few gentlemen seemed to have any notion of the difficulty we were under for naval stores, nor of the great advantage of being independent of all foreign powers for those commodities, nor apprehensive of the difference of purchasing every thing we wanted with our ready money from foreigners, and raising them in our own Plantations, nor of the advantages of raising materials for employing and setting to work more than a million of vagrant indolent wretches, whose time is spent in corrupting the industrious, or roving about the kingdom, or begging from door to door". It is quite clear from this and other indications that the landed interest in the House of Commons could not easily be aroused to support the schemes of the mercantilists. Gee's contention that new enterprises will always be subject to accidents and discouragements too difficult for private persons to surmount without the assistance of the public probably struck them as a doctrine which might involve heavy financial liabilities. Nor were they likely to accept his conclusion that, because bounties on corn had proved advantageous, other bounties would, therefore, necessarily be of benefit to the nation, though here he would seem to be addressing himself to their prejudices.5 The Board of Trade, however, continued to press the case for naval stores. In a comprehensive review made in 1721 the Board declared that supplies of tar and pitch from the colonies had been so abundant that home prices had been reduced and much money had been saved on the balance of trade with the Baltic. The King's speech at the opening of Parliament in October of the same year made special reference to the subject. This was followed by an Act which continued the bounty on hemp and also removed the customs duty on clean hemp entering this country from the colonies. It had been complained that the colonial tar was too hot and burned the cordage, and provision was made that the bounty should not be paid unless the governor of the colony gave a certificate that the tar had been prepared in the prescribed manner. 1 Wood, A Survey of Trade, p. 150. Gee, Trade and Navigation (new ed. 1767), pp. 210-11. Ibid. pp. 211-12. 68 Geo. I, cap. 12. COLONIAL PROVISION TRADE 579 All this concern about naval stores was partly due to the growing recognition of the fact that in the years following the Peace of Utrecht it was becoming more and more difficult to maintain that commercial equilibrium in the colonies which mercantilist principles demanded. The northern colonies were not responding to the policy of the Board of Trade, and that through no fault of their own. They were developing rapidly, and yet their direct trade with the mother country was comparatively small because, as already shown, they could not produce commodities which Great Britain would admit. The temptation to set up their own industries in order to limit the demand for British manufactures was particularly strong. To bribe them not to do so by spending large sums of money on stimulating the production of naval stores was really beyond the means of the mother country; and in view of the resources of the colonies it would have been wasteful. There remained the possibility of allowing them to concentrate on the provision trade. As far as they supplied the needs of the southern colonies and the British West Indies this was compatible with the mercantile system. It was better that Great Britain should send manufactured goods to the colonies than that she should send provisions. Cheap and abundant supplies of provisions were as important to the sugar and tobacco colonies as cheap labour; in fact, they gave the same result when costs of production came to be estimated. There was, however, a limit to this policy. The northern colonies would not continue to send cattle, timber and provisions to the others if they found that the market was over-supplied, and if there were opportunities of sale elsewhere at a higher price. Such opportunities did in fact offer themselves. "Soon after the Peace of Utrecht", according to Postlethwayt,1 "a pernicious commerce began to show itself, between the British northern colonies and the French sugar colonies, which began with bartering the lumber of the former for French sugar and molasses.' وو In theory, the British and French colonies should have been of exclusive advantage to their respective mother countries, but the only way to make sure of this would have been to prevent one group from dealing with the other. Both Great Britain and France had continental and island colonies, and each country would have preferred a system of self-sufficiency. A treaty of neutrality had in fact been agreed to by England and France in 16862 under the terms of which neither Power was to trade with the other's possessions. As matters stood, however, it was impossible or the French settlements in Canada and Louisiana to supply what the French West Indies required: it was also becoming increasingly obvious that the British northern colonies could produce more than the British West Indies 1 Postlethwayt, Malachy, Britain's Commercial Interest explained and improved (1757), 1, 485. Dumont, J., Corps universel diplomatique, vol. ví, рt ¤, pp. 141 seqq. wanted. The natural course was for the northern colonies to send what they could not profitably dispose of within the British system to supply what was lacking in the French system. To this the British mercantilists opposed a twofold objection. It would assist in the economic development of the French sugar colonies, and it would hamper that of the British, giving the former the means to increase the area under cultivation and depriving the latter of cheap cattle, timber and provisions. The problems which the Board of Trade had to face owing to the development in the sugar trade were sufficiently bewildering. In the closing decades of the seventeenth century England had enjoyed the leading place as the purveyor of sugar to the European countries. She greatly valued the benefits arising from the import and re-export of raw and refined sugar. As an enumerated article it had to be exported in the first instance either to England or to one of her colonies; in the one case it paid import duties and in the other the Plantation duties on export. The yield of these duties was a direct contribution to the revenue which the State did not want to forgo. But it was strongly represented in the years immediately following the Peace of Utrecht that sugar was so burdened by these charges that it was losing the foreign market. That there had been a steady decline in the reexport of sugar was beyond question. The Board of Trade had to explore the causes of this decline. The merchants who were consulted pointed out that there had been a great increase of home consumption of sugar and consequently there was not the same surplus available for re-export. This was undoubtedly true; but it did not explain why European countries were not offering high prices for what they could get. Sugar was not dear on the continent because foreign sugar plantations-Dutch, French and Portuguese were now producing it at lower cost than the British could. Their main advantage would seem to have been that the soil they were using was less exhausted. The West Indian interest contended that British sugar bore heavier charges than foreign, and demanded the right of direct export to the continent, i.e. the removal of sugar from the list of enumerated articles. To this the Board of Trade was opposed, and in 1724 it recommended that the principle of enumeration should be maintained. The arguments in favour of this seemed conclusive from the British point of view. Direct export from the West Indies to the continent, if it took place on a large scale, would mean that less sugar would enter this country, and since the British demand was unlikely to decline-for the consumption of tea and coffee was increasing year by year-consumers would have to pay more for their sugar and the revenue would also suffer. There was the additional danger that, if sugar were shipped direct to the continent, it would be impossible to prevent the influx of foreign manufactures into the West Indies as return cargoes. WEST INDIAN SUGAR-BRITISH AND FOREIGN 581 Now that the British West Indies had serious competitors, it became of some significance that the principle of enumeration merely governed the question of the first destination of exported sugar. Great Britain had as a matter of fact bestowed substantial preference on British West Indian sugar, but no general law restricted either the mother country or the colonies as to what sugar they should import. Each colony was free to adopt what course it pleased. There was, indeed, the general bar on trade with French Plantations contained in the treaty of neutrality of 1686, which has already been noticed. When the West Indian planters in 1714 complained of the effects of the trade between the northern colonies and foreign possessions, the Board of Trade drew attention to this treaty. Three years later it advised the colonial governors that such trade was illegal and that the terms of the treaty ought to be observed. But legal opinion was sought and gave an interpretation of the treaty which made it practically useless as an instrument for suppressing trade between British and French colonies. The treaty, it was held, did not empower either of the contracting parties to seize and confiscate the ships and goods of their own subjects for contravening its articles; had it been intended to do this, confirmation of the treaty either by Act of Parliament in Great Britain or by acts of Assembly in the colonies would have been necessary. Before this ruling the treaty had not been seriously regarded; it now became a virtual dead-letter, because the French, who wished to take advantage of such trade, were not likely to seize British ships for trading with their Plantations in defiance of the treaty. The British planters asserted indeed that it was "a traffic not taken up casually or by chance but the result of a well weighed plan formed or at least approved by the Court of France...and intended to be steadily and regularly pursued". In any case the treaty of neutrality did not apply to trade between the British Plantations and those of European countries other than France, though the supply of provisions to the Dutch and Danish islands gave rise to the same objections. The position was complicated by the fact that the practice of importing foreign sugar was not confined to the continental colonies. The British West Indies bought sugar in the foreign Plantations and sent it to Great Britain as though it were their own production. Barbados, for instance, carried on a considerable trade for this purpose with Martinique prior to 1715, when a local act was passed which placed prohibitive duties on the importation of French goods. Merchants were buying French sugar cheaply and getting it into Great Britain at half rates as a British product, thus defrauding the revenue and augmenting the supply to such an extent as to lower prices. This tendency naturally alarmed the planters, and the policy 1 Memorial of Sugar Planters, Merchants and others.... See Pitman, F. W., The Development of the British West Indies, 1700-1763, App. xi. |