tion. As the colonies had of themselves depreciated their currency, England gained its first object and monopolized all gold and silver. Even the shillings of early coinage in Massachusetts were nearly all gathered up, and remitted; but the equality of depreciation could never be maintained. against the rival cupidity of the competitors in bills of credit. In 1708, an act of parliament, supporting the proclamation of Queen Anne, fixed the rates of coin in America, as if by the most august authority to limit the depreciation of bills; but paper money continued to increase in the royal, and still more in the charter, colonies. Thus, in 1709, New York first emitted bills of credit, disposing of the proceeds by vote of the assembly. In 1710, the body politic of South Carolina issued forty-eight thousand pounds, which bore interest, and were loaned to individuals, to be sunk by small annual instalments. These depreciated immediately, yet formed the currency of the colony.

The American post-office defrayed its own expenses. By an act of prerogative, William III. had, in 1692, appointed a postmaster for the northern provinces. New York feebly encouraged, Massachusetts neglected, the enterprise. In 1710, the British parliament erected a post-office for America, establishing the rates of postage, conferring the freedom of all ferries, appointing a summary process for collecting dues, and making New York the centre of its operations. The routes of the mails were gradually extended through all the colonies; Virginia, where it was introduced in 1718, made transient resistance; for "the people," as Spotswood informed the board, "called the rates of postage a tax, and they believed that parliament could not lay any tax on them without the consent of the general assembly." But the rates of postage soon came to be regarded as an equitable payment for a valuable service.

The British parliament interfered for one other purpose, not so directly connected with trade. In 1704, to emancipate the English navy from dependence on Sweden, a bounty was offered on naval stores, and was accompanied by a proviso which extended the jurisdiction of parliament to every grove north of the Delaware. Every pitch-pine tree,

་

not in an enclosure, was consecrated to the purposes of the English navy; and, in the undivided domain, no tree fit for a mast might be cut without the queen's license.

Beyond these measures, parliament at that time did not proceed. The English lawyers of the day had no doubt of the power of parliament to tax America. But we have seen that even the impetuous Saint-John would not carry out the plan for the payment of royal officers in the colonies by a parliamentary tax. Oxford, the lord treasurer, looked to America for the means of supporting its own military establishment. In August, 1711, before paying the garrison at Port Royal, he inquired of the board of trade "whether there be not money of her majesty's revenue in that country to pay them;" and in June, 1713, "foreseeing that great expense would arise to the kingdom by the large supplies of stores demanded for the colonies, he desired the board of trade to consider how they might be made to supply themselves." But the absorbing spirit of faction within the English cabinet of itself baffled every effort at system. The papers of the board of trade began to lie unnoticed in the office of the secretary of state; its annual reports ceased; and whoever had colonial business to transact went directly to the privy council, to the admiralty, to the treasury.

But, with every year of the increase of the colonies, prophecies had been made of their tendencies to independence. "In all these provinces and plantations," thus, in August, 1698, wrote Nicholson, who had been in office in New York and Maryland, and was then governor of Virginia, "a great many people, especially in those under proprietaries, and the two others of Connecticut and Rhode Island, think that no law of England ought to be in force and binding on them without their own consent; for they foolishly say that they have no representative sent from themselves to the parliament, and they look upon all laws made in England, that put any restraint upon them, to be great hardships." Ireland was already reasoning in the same manner; and its writers joined America in disavowing the validity of British statutes in nations not represented in the British legislature.

In 1701, the lords of trade, in a public document, declared "the independency the colonies thirst after is now notorious." "Commonwealth notions improve daily," wrote Quarry, in 1703; "and, if it be not checked in time, the rights and privileges of English subjects will be thought too narrow." In 1705, it was said in print: "The colonists will, in process of time, cast off their allegiance to England, and set up a government of their own;" and by degrees it came to be said "by people of all conditions and qualities, that their increasing numbers and wealth, joined to their great distance from Britain, would give them an opportunity, in the course of some years, to throw off their dependence on the nation, and declare themselves a free state, if not curbed in time, by being made entirely subject to the crown.' "Some great men professed their belief of the feasibleness of it, and the probability of its some time or other actually coming to pass."

CHAPTER XXXII.

PROGRESS OF FRANCE IN NORTH AMERICA.

IF our country, in the inherent opposition between its principles and the English system, was as ripe for governing itself in 1689 as in 1776, the colonists disclaimed, and truly, a present passion for independence. A deep instinct gave assurance that the time was not yet come. They were not merely colonists of England, but they were riveted into an immense colonial system, which every commercial country in Europe had assisted to frame, and which bound in its strong bonds every other quarter of the globe. The question of independence would be not a private strife with England, but a revolution in the commerce and in the policy of the world; in the present fortunes, and, still more, in the prospects of humanity itself. As yet, there was no union among the settlements that fringed the Atlantic; and but one nation in Europe would, at that day, have tolerated not one would have fostered an insurrection. Spain, Spanish Belgium, Holland, and Austria were then the allies of England against France, which, by centralizing its power and by well-considered plans of territorial aggrandizement, excited the dread of a universal monarchy. When Austria, with Belgium, shall abandon its hereditary warfare against France; when Spain and Holland, favored by the armed neutrality of Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, and Russia, shall be ready to join with France in repressing the commercial ambition of England, — then, and not till then, American independence becomes possible. Those changes, extraordinary and improbable as they might have seemed, were to spring from the false principles of the mercantile system, which made France and England enemies. Our borders were become the scenes of jealous collision; our soil was the destined battle-ground on which the grand con

flict of the rivals for commercial privilege was to begin. The struggles for maritime and colonial dominion, which transformed the unsuccessful competitors for supremacy into the defenders of the freedom of the seas, having, in their progress, taught our fathers union, secured to our country the opportunity of independence.

The mercantile system placed the benefit of commerce, not in a reciprocity of exchanges, but in a favorable balance of trade. Its whole wisdom was to sell as much as possible, to buy as little as possible. Pushed to its extreme, the policy would destroy all commerce; it might further the selfish aims of an individual nation; the commerce of the world could flourish only in spite of it. In its mitigated form, it was a necessary source of European wars; for each nation, in its traffic, sought to levy tribute in favor of its industry, and the adjustment of tariffs and commercial privileges was the constant subject of negotiations among states. jealousy of one country envied the wealth of a rival as its own loss.

The

Territorial aggrandizement was also desired and feared, in reference to its influence on European commerce; and, as France, in its ambitious progress, encroached upon the German empire and the Spanish Netherlands, the mercantile interests of England led directly to an alliance with Austria as the head of the empire, and with Spain as the sovereign of Belgium.

Thus the commercial interest was, in European politics, become paramount; it framed alliances, regulated wars, dictated treaties, and established barriers against conquest.

The discovery of America, and of the ocean-path to India, had created maritime commerce, and the European colonial system had united the world. Now, for the first time in the history of man, the oceans vindicated their rights as natural highways; now, for the first time, great powers struggled for dominion on the high seas. The world entered on a new epoch.

Ancient navigation kept near the coast, or was but a passage from isle to isle; commerce now selected, of choice, the boundless deep.