138 Industrial Experiments in Colonial America. 



ket.^ There was little to induce Carolina, Maryland or Vir- 

 ginia to set up manufactures, for their great staples found a 

 steady market, and their exports to Great Britain approached, 

 and after the middle of the eighteenth century equaled, or even 

 exceeded, their imports ; while the northern provinces fell 

 steadily behind. South Carolina, Maryland, and especially Vir- 

 ginia, suffered comparatively little from the lack of coin, be- 

 cause they were able to trade directly with England.^ It is 

 probable that South Carolina, which produced more pitch and 

 tar than all the other colonies together, would not have en- 

 gaged in manufactures, even if the raising of naval stores had 

 never been introduced, since her chief product was rice. New 

 England and New York, where the British government had 

 made the most strenuous efforts to stimulate the production of 

 pitch and tar, produced very little of those commodities for 

 export, and made more homespun clothing and manufactured 

 articles than all the other colonies together. 



It is true that the exports from New England to Great Britain 

 never caught up with the imports, so that the jealously guarded 

 balance of trade inclined properly toward the mother-country ; 

 but, on the other hand, there seems to be no doubt that the at- 

 tempts to kill manufactures by forcing the production of naval 

 stores on New England, was a failure. How far that failure was 

 due to that perversity of the people of which the surveyors of 

 the woods complained, cannot be computed ; but if the history 

 of the trade in naval stores teaches anything, it is, first, that the 

 colonies understood their own interests better than the Board of 

 Trade ; and, in the second place, that through lack of a true 

 understanding of the economic conditions in America and by 



'Macpherson notes, in his Annals of Commerce, Vol. Ill, p. 260, 

 that an overstock of rice in Carolina, in 1743, when the war with 

 France broke out, put the people upon trying to employ their ne- 

 groes on sundry new manufactures of linen and woolen, which they 

 were before accustomed to take from Great Britain, and of which 

 "their mother-country would soon have become jealous, had not, 

 fortunately for them, the true indigo plant happened to be discov. 

 ered just then." 



^Bruce, "Economic History of Virginia," Vol. II, p. 395. 



