were composed of impressed ships, as well as manned by
impressed sailors. These various laws had been tentative in character.
Both firmness of purpose and continuity of effort were lacking to
them; due doubtless to the comparative weakness of the nation in the
scale of European states up to the seventeenth century. During the
reigns of the first two Stuarts, this weakness was emphasized by
internal dissensions; but the appreciation of the necessity for some
radical remedy to the decay of English naval power remained and
increased. To this conviction the ship-money of Charles the First
bears its testimony; but it was left to Cromwell and his associates to
formulate the legislation, upon which, for two centuries to come, the
kingdom was thought to depend, alike for the growth of its merchant
shipping and for the maintenance of the navy. All that preceded has
interest chiefly as showing the origin and growth of an enduring
national conviction, with which the United States came into collision
immediately after achieving independence.

The ninth of October, 1651, is the date of the passing of the Act, the
general terms of which set for two hundred years the standard for
British legislation concerning the shipping industry. The title of the
measure, "Goods from foreign ports, by whom to be imported," indicated
at once that the object in view was the carrying trade; navigation,
rather than commerce. Commerce was to be manipulated and forced into
English bottoms as an indispensable agency for reaching British
consumers. At this time less than half a century had elapsed since the
first English colonists had settled in Massachusetts and Virginia. The
British plantation system was still in its beginnings, alike in
America, Asia, and Africa. When the then recent Civil War ended, in
the overthrow of the royal power, it had been "observed with concern
that the merchants of England had for several years usually freighted
Dutch ships for fetching home their merchandise, because the freights
were lower than in English ships. Dutch ships, therefore, were used
for importing our own American products, while English ships lay
rotting in harbor."[14] "Notwithstanding the regulations made for
confining that branch of navigation to the mother country, it is said
that in the West India Islands there used, at this time, out of forty
ships to be thirty-eight ships Dutch bottoms."[15] English mariners
also, for want of employment, went into the D