n duty laid upon all foreign tonnage. To consider the
probable effects of this legislation, and of the new American
institutions, upon British commerce and navigation, a committee of the
Privy Council was appointed, to which we owe a digested and
authoritative summary of the change of conditions effected by the
British measures, between 1783 and 1790. From its report, based upon
averages of several years, it appears that in the direct trade between
Great Britain and the United States, in which American ships stood on
equal terms with British, there had been little variation in value of
imports or exports, with the single exception of tobacco and rice.
These two articles, which formerly had to pass through Great Britain
as an _entrepot_, now went direct to their destination. The American
shipping--navigation--employed in the trade with Great Britain
herself, was only one-third of the British; the respective tonnage
being 26,564 and 52,595. As this was nearly the proportion of American
to British built ships in the colonial period, American shipping
before the adoption of the Constitution had not gained at all, under
the most favorable treatment conceded to it in British dominions. The
Report, indeed, estimated that it had lost by nearly 20 per cent.[87]

In the colonial trade, on the other hand, very marked British gains
could be reported. The commercially backward communities of Canada,
etc., forbidden now to admit American ships, or to import many
articles from the United States, and given special privileges in the
West Indies, had more than doubled their imports from the mother
country; the amount rising from L379,411 to L829,088. These sums are
not to be regarded in their own triviality, but as harbingers of a
development, which it was hoped would fill the void in the British
imperial system caused by the loss of the former colonies. The West
Indies showed a more gradual increase, though still satisfactory;
their exports since 1774 had risen 20 per cent. It was, however, in
navigation, avowedly the chief aim of the protective legislation, that
the intercolonial results were most encouraging. Through the exclusion
of American competition, British tonnage to Canada and the neighboring
colonies had enlarged fourfold, from 11,219 to 46,106. The national
tonnage engaged between the West Indies and the mother country had
grown from 80,482 to 133,736; 60 per cent. More encouraging still,
from the ideal point of view of a re