The Rise of Manufactures. 139 



contradictory measures the home government helped rather 

 than hindered the economic revokition which preceded the 

 political separation of the colonies from the mother-country. 

 In other words, England in attempting, according to the re- 

 ceived colonial policy of the age, to exploit the plantations failed 

 to appreciate the fact that the colonists were working out, un- 

 consciously for the most part, a commercial independence 

 which the physical conditions of the country and the natural 

 operation of economic laws rendered inevitable. The states- 

 men and economists of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 

 turies vaguely suspected the truth and groped after a way of 

 escape, but, not fully comprehending the case, they let the colo- 

 nies alone when other matters were, for the time, more pressing, 

 and, again, as some warning from over the water recalled their 

 fears lest the mercantile system was not working itself out prop- 

 erly in the colonies, sought to regulate the course of trade by 

 restrictive legislation. 



If only the men who possessed the genius, or the common 

 sense, to take advantage of the natural conditions of commer- 

 cial activity in America and to reconcile the interests of the col- 

 onists with those of the mother-country, had controlled the 

 policy of England, it might have been possible to divert suc- 

 cessfully the otherwise inevitable course of commercial au- 

 tonomy. 



