40 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE 
The Dutch, Mun said, wete taking the bread out of our 
mouths, seeing that fishing was the foundation of their 
wealth and strength—in the words of a States pro- 
clamation of 1624, the chiefest trade and principal gold 
mine of the United Provinces,” 1 and that it was carried 
out in British waters. “The glory and power of these 
Netherlanders . . . consisteth in this fishing of herrings, 
ling and cod in His Majesty’s seas.” #2 It will be remem- 
bered that in the year 1664, when Mun’s treatise first saw 
the light, Great Britain went to war with the Nether- 
lands, and Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, who gave the 
licence for its publication, and who was then Secretary 
of State, no doubt welcomed it as a brief against the 
Dutch, which would carry more weight in that it had 
not been written for the occasion but over thirty years 
previously, and as being calculated to bring home to 
Englishmen the strength of the Netherlands and their 
menace to England. The advantages derived by the 
Dutch from their fishing trade at the expense of Great 
Britain was a favourite theme in the seventeenth 
century. Writing in 1675, Roger Coke described the 
Dutch fishing trade as the basis of all their commerce, 
and wrote of the Dutchmen as for four months in the 
year following the herring in numerous fleets from 
Scotland to Yarmouth, and employing threefold more 
vessels and twofold more mariners than were 
employed by the English.® In 1680 the author of 
‘ Britannia Languens > wrote that ‘ according to modern 
calculations the mere fishing trade for herring and cod 
LP. 186. 2 P. 188. 
¥ A Discourse of Trade, Treatises III and IV : England's Improve- 
ments in two parts, Treatise IV (1675), p. 87.