ng 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 but wide
extremes of boundary, climates, and activities.

This condition, while it lasted, in large degree justified the
Navigation Act, which may be summarily characterized as a great
protective measure, applied to the peculiar conditions of a particular
maritime empire, insuring reciprocal and exclusive benefit to the
several parts. It was uncompromisingly logical in its action, not
hesitating at rigid prohibition of outside competition. Protection, in
its best moral sense, may be defined as the regulation of all the
business of the nation, considered as an interrelated whole, by the
Government, for the best interests of the entire community, likewise
regarded as a whole. This the Navigation Act did for over a century
after its enactment; and it may be plausibly argued that, as a war
resort at least, it afterwards measurably strengthened the hands of
Great Britain during the wars of the French Revolution. No men
suffered more than did the West India planters from its unrelieved
enforcement after 1783; yet in their vehement remonstrance they said:
"The policy of the Act is justly popular. Its regulations, until the
loss of America, under the various relaxations which Parliament has
applied to particular events and exigencies as they arose, have guided
the course of trade without oppressing it; for the markets which those
regulations left open to the consumption of the produce of the
colonies were sufficient to take off the whole, and no foreign country
could have supplied the essential part of their wants materially
cheaper than the colonies of the mother country could supply one
another."

Thus things were, or were thought to be, up to the time when the
revolt of the continental colonies made a breach in the wall of
reciprocal benefit by which the whole had been believed to be
enclosed. The products of the colonies sustained the commercial
prosperity of the mother country, ministering to her exp