390 THE HISTORY OF DUTCH SEA FISHERIES. 



with which the Republic kept neutral in the Seven Years' 

 War, opened her frontiers for Dutch herring, which had 

 long been forbidden the country. The neutrality did not 

 tend to the Republic's political glory, and its fruit did not 

 yield the fishery much profit ; for it will be seen from 

 Appendix A that the decrease in the number of herring- 

 ships was peculiarly rapid in the years following 1758. 

 Even the opening of such a market, from which English 

 herring was excluded, * did not act as a stimulus on the 

 once Grand Fishery, whose energy, as a natural result of 

 two centuries' paternal regulations, was now at as low an ebb 

 as the Republic's in general. The privilege was contemp- 

 tuously withdrawn by France in 1763, after the war's 

 termination ; and as a proof that it had not been taken 

 advantage of while it lasted, its withdrawal, instead of further 

 injuring the herring fishery, was actually followed by a 

 slight increase of it in the next two years (see Ap- 

 pendix A). 



Fiscal immunities proving inefficient to restrain the 

 fisheries' decline, direct premiums were now resorted to. 

 Such a premium seems to have been first granted by the 

 city of Flushing in 1754, to the amount of .30 for each 

 herring-ship sailing from the said port, and for a period of 



* So strictly was this exclusion maintained that the French 

 ambassador at the Hague in the course of 1758 took steps to prevent 

 English herring being sent to France together with Dutch, or packed 

 in the same barrels. A placard dated July 24th and expressly pro- 

 hibiting to mix up foreign herring with Dutch (Gr. PL Boek viii. 1261) 

 was issued by the States merely to content France's apprehension, 

 which power does not seem to have placed much trust in the famous 

 Dutch fishing laws, which implicated a similar prohibition since two 

 centuries. This disgraceful moment in the fisheries' history is fully 

 described in Wagenaar's Vad. Hist. xxii. p. 456 ; xxiii. p. 77, and Ned. 

 Jaars. 1758, p. 1045. See Res. Holland, 1758, pp. 601, 874, 988. 



