the said plantations do suffer any ship or vessel to lade any goods of the growth of the plantations, and carry them to foreign parts, except in English bottoms, under foreiture of the before-named exemption from customs." We shall presently find this principle carried out to its full extent in a subsequent much more memorable measure of the Hump parliament. Meanwhile, during the dissensions that raged at home, and after the triumph of the parliamentary cause, great numbers of the royalists had sought refuge in Virginia, Barbadoes, and the other West India settlements; so that the white population of these dependencies was in general fiercely opposed to the new government, and they might be said to be in a state of rebellion after all the rest of the empire had been reduced to submission and quiet. Barbadoes, indeed, had actually received Lord Willoughby as governor under a commission from Charles II., then in Holland, and had proclaimed Charles as king. It was in these circumstances that the English parliament, in 1651, with the view of punishing at once the people of the colonies and the Dutch, who had hitherto enjoyed the greater part of the carrying-trade between the West Indies and Europe, passed their famous Navigation Act, declaring that no merchandise either of Asia, Africa, or America, except only such as should be imported directly from the place of its growth or manufacture in Europe, should be imported into England, Ireland, or any of the plantations in any but English-built ships, belonging either to English or English-plantation subjects, navigated by English commanders, and having at least three-fourths of the sailors Englishmen. It was also further enacted that no goods of the growth, production, or manufacture of any country in Europe should be imported into Great Britain except in British ships, or in such ships as were the real property of the people of the country or place in which the goods were produced, or from which they could only be, or most usually were, exported. Upon this law, which was re-enacted after the Restoration, and which down to our own day has been generally regarded and upheld as the palladium of
