establishment in the colonies, sometimes by
high duties, and sometimes by absolute prohibitions.
While, for example, Muscovado sugars from
the British plantations pay, upon importation,
only 6s. 4d. the hundred weight, white sugars
pay L.1 : 1 : 1; and refined, either double or
single, in loaves, L.4 : 2 : 58⁄20ths. When
those high duties were imposed, Great Britain
was the sole, and she still continues to be,
the principal market, to which the sugars of
the British colonies could be exported. They
amounted, therefore, to a prohibition, at first
of claying or refining sugar for any foreign
market, and at present of claying or refining
it for the market which takes off, perhaps,
more than nine-tenths of the whole produce.
The manufacture of claying or refining sugar,
accordingly, though it has flourished in
all the sugar colonies of France, has been little
cultivated in any of those of England, except
for the market of the colonies themselves.
While Grenada was in the hands of the French,
there was a refinery of sugar, by claying, at
least upon almost every plantation. Since it
fell into those of the English, almost all works
of this kind have been given up; and there
are at present (October 1773), I am assured,
not above two or three remaining in the island.
At present, however, by an indulgence of the
custom-house, clayed or refined sugar, if reduced
from loaves into powder, is commonly
imported as Muscovado.
While Great Britain encourages in America
the manufacturing of pig and bar iron, by
exempting them from duties to which the like
commodities are subject when imported from
any other country, she imposes an absolute
prohibition upon the erection of steel furnaces
and slit-mills in any of her American plantations.
She will not suffer her colonies to work
in those more refined manufactures, even for
their own consumption; but insists upon their
purchasing of her merchants and manufacturers
all goods of this kind which they have occasion
for.
She prohibits the exportation from one province
to another by water, and even the carriage
by land upon horseback, or in a cart, of
hats, of wools, and woollen goods, of the produce
of America; a regulation which effectually
prevents the establishment of any manufacture
of such commodities for distant sale,
and confines the industry of her colonists in
this way to such coarse and household manufactures
as a private family commonly makes
for its own use, or for that of some of its
neighbours in the same province.
To prohibit a great people, however, from
making all that they can of every part of their
own produce, or from employing their stock
and industry in the way that they judge most
advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation
of the most sacred rights of mankind.
Unjust, however, as such prohibitions may be,
they have not hitherto been very hurtful to
the colonies. Land is still so cheap, and, consequently,
labour so dear among them, that
they can import from the mother country almost
all the more refined or more advanced
manufactures cheaper than they could make
them for themselves. Though they had not,
therefore, been prohibited from establishing
such manufactures, yet, in their present state
of improvement, a regard to their own interest
would probably have prevented them from
doing so. In their present state of improvement,
those prohibitions, perhaps, without
cramping their industry, or restraining it from
any employment to which it would have gone
of its own accord, are only impertinent badges
of slavery imposed upon them, without any
sufficient reason, by the groundless jealousy
of the merchants and manufacturers of the
mother country. In a more advanced state,
they might be really oppressive and insupportable.
Great Britain, too, as she confines to her
own market some of the most important productions
of the colonies, so, in compensation,
she gives to some of them an advantage in
that market, sometimes by imposing higher
duties upon the like productions when imported
from other countries, and sometimes
by giving bounties upon their importation
from the colonies. In the first way, she gives
an advantage in the home market to the sugar,
tobacco, and iron of her own colonies;
and, in the second, to their raw silk, to their
hemp and flax, to their indigo, to their naval
stores, and to their building timber. This
second way of encouraging the colony produce,
by bounties upon importation, is, so far
as I have been able to learn, peculiar to Great
Britain: the first is not. Portugal does not
content herself with imposing higher duties
upon the importation of tobacco from any
other country, but prohibits it under the severest
penalties.
With regard to the importation of goods
from Europe, England has likewise dealt
more liberally with her colonies than any other
nation.
Great Britain allows a part, almost always
the half, generally a larger portion, and sometimes
the whole, of the duty which is paid upon
the importation of foreign goods, to be
drawn back upon their exportation to any foreign
country. No independent foreign country,
it was easy to foresee, would receive them,
if they came to it loaded with the heavy duties
to which almost all foreign goods are
subjected on their importation into Great Britain.
Unless, therefore, some part of those
duties was drawn back upon exportation,
there was an end of the carrying trade; a
trade so much favoured by the mercantile
system.
Our colonies, however, are by no means
independent foreign countries; and Great