then mainly relied for the purpose of making her
colonies a source of profit to her. The main effect of these was to
forbid the colonies to trade with any neighbour save the mother country.
This condition, to which the colonists seem to have offered no
opposition, gave to the British manufacturers the immense advantage of
an unrestricted supply of raw material to which no foreigner had access.
It is among the curious ironies of history that the prosperity of
Lancashire, which was afterwards to be identified with Free Trade, was
originally founded upon this very drastic and successful form of
Protection.

The more northerly colonies had no such natural advantages. The bulk of
the population lived by ordinary farming, grew wheat and the hard
cereals and raised cattle. But during the eighteenth century England
herself was still an exporting country as regards these commodities, and
with other nations the colonists were forbidden to trade. The Northern
colonies had, therefore, no considerable export commerce, but on the
seaboard they gradually built up a considerable trade as carriers, and
Boston and New York merchant captains began to have a name on the
Atlantic for skill and enterprise. Much of the transoceanic trade passed
into their hands, and especially one most profitable if not very
honourable trade of which, by the Treaty of Utrecht, England had
obtained a virtual monopoly--the trade in Negro slaves.

The pioneer of this traffic had been Sir John Hawkins, one of the
boldest of the great Elizabethan sailors. He seems to have been the
first of the merchant adventurers to realize that it might prove
profitable to kidnap Negroes from the West Coast of Africa and sell them
into slavery in the American colonies. The cultivation of cotton and
tobacco in the Southern plantations, as of sugar in the West Indies,
offered a considerable demand for labour of a type suitable to the
Negro. The attempt to compel the native Indians to such labour had
failed; the Negro proved more tractable. By the time with which we are
dealing the whole industry of the Southern colonies already rested upon
servile coloured labour.

In the Northern colonies--that is, those north of Maryland--the Negro
slave existed, but only casually, and, as it were, as a sort of
accident. Slavery was legal in all the colonies--even in Pennsylvania,
whose great founder had been almost alone in that age in disapproving of
it. As for the New England Puritans, th