SETTLEMENTS ON TUE DEMERARY, &C. 17 



was cultivated in our districts, as in the East Indies, we should 

 no doubt be still better off. 



The perverseness of the English navigation-laws provides for 

 the West-Indian trade a most perishable sort of shipping; when, 

 by suffering ships to be built on the coast of South America, 

 a much cheaper and more durable commodity could be had. 

 If British-built ships had no peculiar privileges, little colonics 

 of ship-carpenters would go and station themselves in all the 

 woody parts of South America, which are within reach of 

 water- carriage ; would there build, at a venture, vessels in- 

 numerable on the spot, and bring them for sale to the chief 

 sea-ports. With the refuse timber they would construct their 

 own huts, and would found a number of villages, the seats 

 of future commerce and consumption. The lumber and 

 shingle now got from North America, both here and in the 

 West Indies, could in great part be derived from the southern 

 continent, and a set of wood-clearers would originate there 

 also, to prepare the extension of agriculture inland. Lord Bla- 

 quiere, and the other parliamentary advocates of the old navi- 

 gation-laws, do not seem aware of the positive mischief and 

 hourly loss resulting from the use of British-built shipping ; 

 nor of the delay of colonial improvement resulting from re- 

 fusing to their vast forests the natural market. Provinces of 

 woods now valueless would acquire an instantaneous impor- 

 tance, a transferable marketable worth, if ships built in the 



