BRITISH TRADERS' TACTICS.
By the middle of the seventeenth century the colonial merchants were in a position to establish manufactures to compete with the British. A seafaring race and a mercantile fleet had come into a militant existence; and ambitious designs were meditated of conquering a part of the import and export trade held by the British. The colonial shipowner, sending tobacco, corn, timber or fish to Europe did not see why he should not load his ship with commodities on the return trip and make a double profit. It was now that the British trading class peremptorily stepped in and used the power of government to suppress in its infancy a competition that alarmed them.
Heavy export duties were now declared on every colonial article which would interfere with the monopoly which the British trading class held, and aimed to hold, while the most exacting duties were put on non-British imports. Colonial factories were killed off by summary legislation. In 1699 Parliament enacted that no wool yarn or woolen manufactures of the American colonies should be exported to any place whatever. This was a destructive bit of legislation, as nearly every colonial rural family kept sheep and raised flax and were getting expert at the making of coarse linen and woolen cloths. No sooner had the colonists begun to make paper than that industry was likewise choked. With hats it was the same. The colonists had scarcely begun to export hats to Spain, Portugal and the West Indies before the British Company of Hatters called upon the Government to put a stop to this colonial interference with their trade. An act was thereupon passed by Parliament forbidding the exportation of hats from any American colony, and the selling in one colony of hats made in another. Colonial iron mills began to blast; they were promptly