The Contest with Commercial
Restrictions
BY JOHN BASSETT MOORE, LL.D.
Professor of International Law and Diplomacy, Columbia University
WHEN viewed in their wider relations, the efforts of the United States to establish the rights of neutrals and the freedom of the seas are seen to form a part of the great struggle for the liberation of commerce from the restrictions with which the spirit of national monopoly had fettered and confined it. When the United States declared their independence, exclusive restrictions, both in the exchange of commodities and in their transportation, existed on every side. The system of colonial monopoly was but the emanation of the general principle, on which nations then consistently acted, of regarding everything "bestowed on others as so much withholden from themselves."
Such was the prospect on which the United States looked when they achieved their independence. With exceptions comparatively unimportant, there was not a single port in the Western Hemisphere with which an American vessel could lawfully trade, outside of its own country. But the exclusion most seriously felt was that from the British West Indies. Prior to the Revolution the burdens of the restrictive system were essentially mitigated by the intercolonial trade, the British colonists on the continent finding their best market in the British islands; but when the United States, by establishing their independence, became to Great Britain a foreign nation, they at once collided with her colonial system. American statesmen foresaw these things and endeavored to guard against them, but in vain. When the provisional articles of peace with Great Britain were later converted into a definitive treaty, without the addition of any commercial clauses, the hope of establishing the relations between the two countries at the outset on the broad basis of mutual freedom of intercourse disappeared.
In the contest with commercial restrictions, the government of the United States adopted as the basis of its policy the principle of reciprocity. In its later diplomacy, the term "reciprocity" is much used to denote agreements designed to increase the interchange of commodities by mutual or equivalent reductions of duty. Tested by recent experience, the later "reciprocity" might not inaptly be described as a policy recommended by free-traders as an escape from protection, and by protectionists as an escape from free trade, but distrusted by both and supported by neither. It is, however, impossible to doubt that, in the efforts of the United States to bring about the abolition of the cumbersome and obstructive contrivances of the old navigation laws, the policy of reciprocity proved to be an efficient instrument in furthering the tendency towards greater commercial freedom. It was announced by the government at the very threshold of its existence. In the preamble to the treaty of commerce with France of 1778, it was declared that the contracting parties, wishing to "fix in an equitable and permanent manner" the rules that should govern their commerce, had judged that this end "could not be better obtained than by taking for the basis of their agreement the most perfect equality and reciprocity, and by carefully avoiding all those burdensome preferences which are usually sources of debate, embarrassment, and discontent; by leaving, also, each party at liberty to make, respecting commerce and navigation, those interior regulations which it shall find most convenient to itself; and by founding the advantage of commerce solely upon reciprocal utility and the
