dread would be
intensified by the conviction, universally held, that to remove any of
these artificial supports would be to imperil at the same time the
Royal Navy, the sudden expansion of which, from a peace to a war
footing, depended upon impressment from the protected merchant ships.
It will be seen also that with such precedents of _entrepot_, for the
nourishing of British commerce, it was natural to turn to the same
methods,--although in a form monstrously exaggerated,--when Napoleon
by his decrees sought to starve British commerce to death. In
conception and purpose, the Orders in Council of 1807 were simply a
development of the _entrepot_ system. Their motto, "No trade save
through England,"--the watchword of the ministry of Canning,
Castlereagh, and Perceval, 1807-12,--was merely the revival towards
the United States, as an independent nation, of the methods observed
towards her when an assemblage of colonies, forty years before; the
object in both cases being the welfare of Great Britain, involved in
the monopoly of an important external commerce, the material of which,
being stored first in her ports, paid duty to her at the expense of
continental consumers.

Nor was there in the thought of the age, external to Great Britain,
any corrective of the impressions which dominated her commercial
policy. "Commercial monopoly," wrote Montesquieu, "is the leading
principle of colonial intercourse;" and an accomplished West Indian,
quoting this phrase about 1790, says: "The principles by which the
nations of Europe were influenced were precisely the same: (1) to
secure to themselves respectively the most important productions of
their colonies, and (2) to retain to themselves exclusively the
advantage of supplying the colonies with European goods and
manufactures."[33] "I see," wrote John Adams from France, in 1784,
"that the French merchants regard their colonies as English merchants
considered us twenty years ago." The rigor of the French colonial
trade system had been relaxed during the War of American Independence,
as was frequently done by all states during hostilities; but when
Louis XVI., in 1784, sought to continue this, though in an extremely
qualified concession, allowing American vessels of under sixty tons a
limited trade between the West Indies and their own country, the
merchants of Marseilles, Bordeaux, Rochelle, Nantes, St. Malo, all
sent in excited remonstrances, which found support in the provincial