colonies imported
corn from the mother country. For some time past the Old World has been
fed from the New. The scarcity which you have felt would have been a
desolating famine, if this child of your old age, with a true filial
piety, with a Roman charity, had not put the full breast of its youthful
exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent.

As to the wealth which the colonies have drawn from the sea by their
fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely
thought those acquisitions of value, for they seemed even to excite your
envy; and yet the spirit by which that enterprising employment has been
exercised ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and
admiration. And pray, Sir, what in the world is equal to it? Pass by
the other parts, and look at the manner in which the people of New
England have of late carried on the whale-fishery. Whilst we follow them
among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into
the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits, whilst
we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they
have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at
the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the South.
Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the
grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the
progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more
discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We
know, that, whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on
the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic
game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their
fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the
perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous
and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous
mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this
recent people,--a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle,
and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood. When I contemplate these
things,--when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing
to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form
by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government, but that,
through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been