THE WAR AND FLUCTUATIONS IN MARITIME INTERCOURSE 675 
ancient rivals at once. They were unable, even when united, AD ine 
to do her serious damage’; the distant trades with India, puring the 
Africa and Brazil, and with the United States, remained Zevolition 
open, though they were of course attended with unusual risk. 
The chief privation was due to the fact that none of these 
distant trades served, as European trade might have done, to 
replenish the supplies of food in the years of dearth; for the 
Armed Neutrality cut us off from the areas of wheat on the 
Baltic®. The serious risk of not being self-sufficing in our 
food supply was clearly felt, though there were possibilities of 
importation even then, as the United States exported food 
stuffs® to Spain and Portugal. The most obvious result of 
the war was to give an unhealthy stimulus to English tillage, 
and to force on rapid changes in the rural districts, but it must 
have caused much uncertainty in various industries, and con- 
tributed to the distress of which we hear among operatives. 
With the Peace of Amiens in 1802, hopes were entertained 
of still greater developments, as the trade of the whole world 
was suddenly thrown open to England. The Dutch indeed 
were replaced in the possession of the colonies they had lost, 
but their marine had suffered severely, and the triumph of 
England over her old rival was at last complete. Great and after 
britain had attained to the same sort of maritime supremacy oe pace 
which Holland had secured in 1648, while the rapid develop- Re 
ment of the textile and iron manufactures gave her prosperity 
a prospective stability which Holland had never enjoyed in 
the same degree. English traders and manufacturers were, 
Jt: 
‘Bq 
4 
"a 
! Reinhard, Present state of the Commerce of Great Britain, 19, 46. 
' Rose, Our Food Supply, in Monthly Review, March 1902, p. 87. 
3 Yeats, Recent and Ewisting Commerce, 237. 
4 Though the Treaty of Amiens restored to the Dutch most of the colonial 
yossessions they had lost, they never recovered the effects of this war, in which 
they were crushed by the hostility of their larger neighbours. Their exclusion 
from American trade by the English parliament in 1651 was felt as a grievance 
in the middle of the eighteenth century, <.e. 80 soon as their development in 
other directions was checked, and this later experience appears to have given 
rise to the opinion that the maintenance of the Navigation Acts inflicted serious 
injury, even after 1667 when the Dutch had been admitted as intermediaries 
in the German trade (Dumout, op. cit. vm. i. 48). The greatness of Holland, 
like that of Carthage, had been raised, not on the stable basis of land, 
but on the fluctuating basis of trade. “The manufacturers became merchants, 
and the merchants became agents and carriers; so that the solid sources 
43._9