44 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE 
Adam Smith they were the people of Europe who 
most neatly approached to free trade. Mun saw what 
strength and riches the policy of unrestricted or lightly 
taxed imports had brought to the Netherlands; he 
saw again how the port of Leghorn had risen in conse- 
quence of the liberal commercial policy of the then 
Grand Duke of Tuscany ; and he applied the lesson to 
England, while insisting on the great gain to be derived 
from trade with distant countries (on which point 
Adam Smith differed from him), ‘besides the increase 
of shipping and mariners thereby.” ! 
In the first years after the Restoration, when 
Mun’s treatise was published, Clarendon was the 
principal adviser.of Charles II. He was a member 
of the General Council of Foreign Plantations con- 
stituted before the end of 1660, and he claimed to be, 
and no doubt was, a good friend of the Overseas 
Empire. He said of himself that ‘at His Majesty’s re- 
turn and before, he had used all the endeavours he could 
to prepare and dispose the King to a great esteem 
of his plantations, and to encourage the improve- 
ment of them in all the ways which could reasonably 
be proposed tohim.”2 Doyle’s estimate of his policy 
towards New England was that it was not a policy 
conspicuous for liberality or farsighted wisdom. Butit 
was in the main just and intelligent.” ® We have seen 
that in 1661-2 Clarendon gave his name in support 
of The Company for Propagation of the Gospel in 
New England, and he was one of the eight patentees 
i 
2 LAr Clarendon (Oxford, 1827, 3 vols.), vol. iii, p. 407. 
8 The English in America, ut sup.: The Puritan Colonies, vol. ii, 
D. 150. ¢ Supra, p. 29.