Benns: British West India Carrying-Trade 85 
duties on articles imported into British possessions in America 
and the West Indies ‘‘from other places” in America and the 
West Indies which was designed to afford a slight protection 
to British North American trade.^^o 
Nevertheless, when the concessions of the British act of 
1822 are contrasted with the “flat refusal” of the British plen- 
ipotentiaries even to treat on the subject in 1815, and their 
cool assertion at that time that Great Britain was not pre- 
pared to make any change in the colonial policy to which she 
had so long adhered,^^® it can easily be seen how great a 
change had been brought about by the American navigation 
acts of 1818 and 1820. Canning, in a letter some years later, 
explained that the “obvious way” of meeting the American 
interdiction of the British West India trade 
would have been to open to other commercial and maritime Powers the 
trade refused by the United States. Circumstances, not necessary to be 
detailed here, rendered that expedient at that time unadvisable.'^^^ 
Considerable light is also thrown upon the conflict by an- 
other excerpt from the same letter. 
Because Great Britain submitted, at a moment of necessity, to terms 
which, though not unjust, were inconvenient to her, she did not bind 
herself to continue to submit to them when that necessity should have 
passed away. Scarcity may justify the demand for a high price, and 
monopoly may give the power of exacting it; but there is surely no un- 
derstood compact between the buyer and seller that the former, shall not 
endeavor to make himself independent of the latter, by opening the 
market to general competition.^®- 
What is this but admitting what had been contended in the 
halls of the American Congress four years before, that the 
British West Indies were dependent upon the United States 
for their supplies, that they could procure them nowhere else, 
that eventually “at a moment of necessity” Great Britain 
would be compelled to submit Huskisson openly admitted 
that the British act was passed because supplies from the 
United States were “so necessary” to the West India colo- 
nies and Canning’s secretary, in his Political Life of George 
Canning, says 
129 lUd., V, 236. 
12® See above, p. 32. 
121 Am. State Papers, For. Rel., VI, 251. 
Ibid. (Italics are my own.) 
122 See above, p. 51. 
Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates (2d series), XVII, 645. 
