treasure, beggar our gentlemen, and starve our common people; and whether the gentlemen of Britain, after all their glorious victories, ought at last to be contented to become hewers of wood and drawers of water to the nation they have so often beaten."[1] In a subsequent part of the paper it is maintained, as used to be done by most reasoners on this side down to our own day, that by the treaty of commerce with Portugal we were absolutely bound to admit the wines of that country at a lower duty than those of France for ever, or at least so long as the Portuguese chose to admit our woollens at the then duty—a construction which the following express stipulation in the treaty itself sufficiently refutes:—"But, if at any time this deduction or abatement of customs, which is to be made as aforesaid, shall in any manner be attempted and prejudiced, it shall be just and lawful for his sacred royal majesty of Portugal again to prohibit the woollen cloths and the rest of the British woollen manufactures."
With all its extravagance upon some points, The British Merchant contains a good deal of information on the state of our commerce at the close of the reign of Anne, and most of its facts may probably be confided in, whatever may be thought of many of its inferences and reasonings. Notwithstanding all the methodising the original papers are stated to have received on their republication in a collected form, the three volumes of which the book consists are still a confused enough miscellany; but we shall endeavour to select from the mass some of the particulars that seem most curious or otherwise worthy of notice.
In his preface the editor, enumerating the peculiar commercial advantages of Great Britain, states that in a list he had seen of the merchants in and about London, printed in the year 1677, they were 1786 in all: "I know," he adds, "above 400 of them, who are all true merchants, that is, importers and exporters of goods, for no other are such. It the whole list, then, is true, as it probably is, and we add to those the merchants in Bristol, and other trading towns of Great Britain, Ireland, and
- ↑ British Merchant, i. 181.
