lf. In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries all the commercial legislation of
the great colonizing states was based upon this theory of the use of a
colony. For effectiveness, it shared to some extent the characteristic
features of legislation for making water run up hill. It retarded
commercial development all over the world, fostered monopolies, made the
rich richer and the poor poorer, hindered the interchange of ideas and
the refinement of manners, and sacrificed millions of human lives in
misdirected warfare; but what it was intended to do it did not do. The
sturdy race of smugglers--those despised pioneers of a higher
civilization--thrived in defiance of kings and parliaments; and as it
was impossible to carry out such legislation thoroughly without stopping
trade altogether, colonies and mother countries contrived to increase
their wealth in spite of it. The colonies, however, understood the
animus of the theory in so far as it was directed against them, and the
revolutionary sentiment in America had gained much of its strength from
the protest against this one-sided justice. In one of its most important
aspects, the Revolution was a deadly blow aimed at the old system of
trade restrictions. It was to a certain extent a step in realization of
the noble doctrines of Adam Smith. But where the scientific thinker
grasped the whole principle involved in the matter, the practical
statesmen saw only the special application which seemed to concern them
for the moment. They all understood that the Revolution had set them
free to trade with other countries than England, but very few of them
understood that, whatever countries trade together, the one cannot hope
to benefit by impoverishing the other.

This point is much better understood in England to-day than in the
United States; but a century ago there was little to choose between the
two countries in ignorance of political economy. England had gained
great wealth and power through trade with her rapidly growing American
colonies. One of her chief fears, in the event of American independence,
had been the possible loss of that trade. English merchants feared that
American commerce, when no longer confined to its old paths by
legislation, would somehow find its way to France and Holland and Spain
and other countries, until nothing would be left for England. The
Revolution worked no such change, however. The principal trade of the
United States was with England, as bef