172 PARLIAMENTARY COLBERTISM 
AD. 1629 Navigation Act lay ready to hand, as a convenient instru- 
—1776. ar, : = 
he Navi. TeDt for administering commercial affairs on the new and 
gation Acts approved lines of fostering industry; and the expedient of 
supplied a 3 ; y 
suitable regulating this branch of commerce, by delegating it to a 
mestamam Company, was inapplicable. Though several of the trading 
Companies survived the Revolution, they no longer served as 
a satisfactory medium for enforcing rules of trade, as they had 
done in the times of Elizabeth; the plantation trade could 
be controlled, without being confined to a privileged body of 
merchants, through the machinery of the Navigation Acts. 
There was an elaborate system for the registration of ships, 
and the owners could be compelled to give bonds for carrying 
their cargoes to a destination approved by Government. In 
shis way it was possible to retain to the mother-country® the 
whole business of supplying the colonists with imports of 
avery sort? and at the same time to render England a staple 
‘or the distribution of the more valuable American products 
in other parts of the world. Fish, cereals, and timber, which 
were the principal commodities of the New England States, 
might be shipped to any market; but the tobacco of Virginia, 
the rice and cotton of Carolina, and the sugar of the West 
for enume- . . ” 
rated com. Indian islands, along with naval stores, were enumerated 
modities.  gnecially, and these commodities were reserved for shipping 
1 The official view of the economic importance of the colonies is clearly stated 
in 15 C. I. ¢. 7, § 4, “ And in reguard His Majesties Plantations beyond the Seas 
are inhabited and peopled by His Subjects of this His Kingdome of England ; for 
she maintaining a greater correspondence and kindnesse between them, and 
feepeing them in a firmer dependance upon it, and rendring them yet more 
beneficiall and advantagious unto it in the farther Imployment and Increase of 
English Shipping and Seamen, vent of English Woollen and other Manufactures 
and Commodities, rendring the Navigation to and from the same more safe and 
theape, and makeing this Kingdome a Staple, not onely of the Commodities of 
those Plantations, but alsoe of the Commodities of other Countryes and Places, 
for the supplying of them; and it being the usage of other Nations to keepe their 
"Plantations] Trade to themselves.” 
2 As a consequence the balance of trade was steadily against the colonists. 
“The importation of New England exceeds the exportation, which, if not balanced, 
will bring this double evil,—it will oblige us to set up manufactures of our own, 
which will entirely destroy the naval stores trade and employ the very hands that 
might be employed in stores. * * * The best way to keep the colonies firm to the 
‘nterest of the kingdom is to keep them dependent on it for all their necessaries, 
and not by any hardships to force them to subsist of themselves. * * * Allow them 
to keep the balance of their trade, and they will never think of manufactures.” 
Banister, quoted by E. Lord, Industrial Experiments in the British Colonies of 
North America, p. 133. 
for con- 
trolling 
thesr traffic