1910.] GENESIS OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE. 



Applied to the colonies, this system would aim at making them 

 enter into the commonwealth as an integrant part. Each country 

 claimed to reserve for itself the commerce with her colonies. 

 It vvas the central government that, in some way or other, 

 backed up most colonial establishments, and the public object 

 of these was to put national production in the place of "' foreign 

 import; by various measures — monopolies and privileges, duties 

 and navigation acts — the government strove to confine colonial 

 commerce to the mother country. 



It was inevitable that the more the colonies developed, the 

 more should they feel such commercial restrictions intolerable. 

 By necessity of nature, they gradually grew into new economic 

 units, and their economic interests, from the very first, were 

 based on foundations different from those of the old countries. 

 From the outset, the principle of self-sustainment was set aside 

 as far as the colonies were concerned, their object being not 

 to suffice to themselves by their own yield, but to apply them- 

 selves to merchandise that the mother country stood in need of, 

 and become the outlet for her surplus production. Their very 

 existence was a breach in the system of Natural-Oekonomie; 

 the exchange of goods, commerce, was vital to their welfare. 

 Inevitably, therefore, their policy would be not mercantilism, 

 but free trade. 



The contlict of interests which, in this way, arose between 

 the mother country and the colony, made itself felt within all 

 the colonial empires of the eighteenth century, more forcibly so, 

 however, in the British empire than anywhere else. Indeed, one 

 of the British colonies, for a long time the most populous of 

 them, New England, far from being established by public sup- 

 port, was on the contrary founded in defiance of the home 

 authorities, and the natural resources of this colony prompted 

 her to compete with English production rather than supplement 

 it. Now it may be said of all the British colonies that they had 

 a population which, contrary to all other colonists, were trained 

 from home in the art of self-government, not so much by the 

 parliamentary system of England as by all the different forms 



