ort trade, and
supplying a reserve of consumers for her monopoly of manufactures,
which they were forbidden to establish for themselves, or to receive
from foreigners. She on her part excluded from the markets of the
empire foreign articles which her colonies produced, constituting for
them a monopoly of the imperial home market, as well in Great Britain
as in the sister colonies. The carriage of the whole was confined to
British navigation, the maintenance of which by this means raised the
British Navy to the mastery of the seas, enabling it to afford to the
entire system a protection, of which convincing and brilliant evidence
had been afforded during the then recent Seven Years' War. As a matter
of political combination and adjustment, for peace or for war, the
general result appeared to most men of that day to be consummate in
conception and in development, and therefore by all means to be
perpetuated. In that light men of to-day must realize it, if they
would adequately understand the influence exercised by this
prepossession upon the course of events which for the United States
issued in the War of 1812.

In this picture, so satisfactory as a whole, there had been certain
shadows menacing to the future. Already, in the colonial period, these
had been recognized by some in Great Britain as predictive of
increasing practical independence on the part of the continental
colonies, with results injurious to the empire at large, and to the
particular welfare of the mother kingdom. In the last analysis, this
danger arose from the fact that, unlike the tropical West Indies,
these children were for the most part too like their parent in
political and economical character, and in permanent natural
surroundings. There was, indeed, a temporary variation of activities
between the new communities, where the superabundance of soil kept
handicrafts in abeyance, and the old country, where agriculture was
already failing to produce food sufficient for the population, and men
were being forced into manufactures and their export as a means of
livelihood. There was also a difference in their respective products
which ministered to beneficial exchange. Nevertheless, in their
tendencies and in their disposition, Great Britain and the United
States at bottom were then not complementary, but rivals. The true
complement of both was the West Indies; and for these the advantage of
proximity, always great, and especially so with regard to the