water-melons, and cucumbers, in the open field; apples, pears, cherries, peaches, nectarines, goose-berries, currants, strawberries, and rasberries, gathering some every month from May till October. Their grapes, though plentiful to excess, are inferior. These are circumstances that make it neither difficult nor expensive to keep an excellent table. The wine commonly drank is Madeira, at not more than half the price of England; freight is cheaper, and there is none, or a very trifling duty. French and Spanish wines are also drank; rum is very cheap; and good beer is brewed by those who are attentive to the operation.

From hence it is sufficiently clear, that the time passed at the table need not be a barren entertainment.

B. The People of New York, 17591

The inhabitants of New York were more sociable than the New Englanders, and as prosperous as those of any of the colonies. Burnaby was an English clergyman, who traveled extensively throughout the colonies, and wrote entertainingly of his impressions.

The inhabitants of New York, in their character, very much resemble the Pensylvanians: more than half of them are Dutch, and almost all traders: they are, therefore, habitually frugal, industrious, and parsimonious. Being however of different nations, different languages, and different religions, it is almost impossible to give them any precise or determinate character. The women are handsome and agreeable; though rather more reserved than the Philadelphian ladies. Their amusements are much the same as in Pensylvania; viz. balls, and sleighing expeditions in the winter; and, in the summer, going in parties upon the water, and fishing; or making excursions into the country. . . .

The present state of this province is flourishing: it has an extensive trade to many parts of the world, particularly to the West Indies; and has acquired great riches by the commerce which it has carried on, under flags of truce, to Cape-François and Monte-Christo. The troops, by having made it the place of their general rendezvous, have also enriched it very much. However, it is burthened with taxes, and the present public debt amounts to more than 300,000l. currency. The taxes are laid upon estates real and personal; and there are

1 Travels through the Middle Settlements of North-America, in the Years 1759 and 1760. By Andrew Burnaby (London, 1775), 66–7.

duties upon Negroes, and other importations. The provincial troops are about 2600 men. The difference of exchange between currency and bills, is from 70 to 80 per cent.

C. An Adverse View of Virginians, 17591

An unfriendly characterization of the inhabitants of Virginia is given by Burnaby.

From what has been said of this colony [Virginia], it will not be difficult to form an idea of the character of its inhabitants. The climate and external appearance of the country conspire to make them indolent, easy, and good-natured; extremely fond of society, and much given to convivial pleasures. In consequence of this, they seldom show any spirit of enterprise, or expose themselves willingly to fatigue. Their authority over their slaves renders them vain and imperious, and entire strangers to that elegance of sentiment, which is so peculiarly characteristic of refined and polished nations. Their ignorance of mankind and of learning, exposes them to many errors and prejudices, especially in regard to Indians and negroes, whom they scarcely consider as of the human species; so that it is almost impossible, in cases of violence, or even murder, committed upon those unhappy people by any of the planters, to have the delinquents brought to justice; for either the grand-jury refuse to find the bill, or the petit jury bring in their verdict, not guilty.

The display of a character thus constituted, will naturally be in acts of extravagance, ostentation, and a disregard of economy; it is not extraordinary, therefore, that the Virginians out-run their incomes; and that having involved themselves in difficulties, they are frequently tempted to raise money by bills of exchange, which they know will be returned protested, with ten per cent. interest.

The public or political character of the Virginians corresponds with their private one: they are haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can scarcely bear the thought of being controuled by any superior power. Many of them consider the colonies as independent states, not connected with Great Britain, otherwise than by having the same common King, and being bound to her by natural affection. There are but few of them that have a turn for business, and even those are by no means expert at it. I

1 Travels through the Middle Settlements in North-America, in the Years 1759 and 1760. By Andrew Burnaby (London, 1775). In Pinkerton, Voyages and Travels, XIII, 714-6.

have known them, upon a very urgent occasion, vote the relief of a garrison, without once considering whether the thing was practicable, when it was most evidently and demonstrably otherwise. In matters of commerce they are ignorant of the necessary principles that must prevail between a colony and the mother country; they think it a hardship not to have an unlimited trade to every part of the world. They consider the duties upon their staples as injurious only to themselves; and it is utterly impossible to persuade them that they affect the consumer also. However, to do them justice, the same spirit of generosity prevails here which does in their private character; they never refuse any necessary supplies for the support of government when called upon, and are a generous and loyal people. .

The Carolinians live in much the same easy and luxurious manner as the Virginians. The planters are remarkably hospitable towards strangers; and persons who fall into distress through bad success or misfortune scarce ever fail of being relieved by their liberality: so that beggary is almost unknown in these parts of the world.

There are supposed to be 300,000 souls in North Carolina, amongst whom are great numbers of Negroes and other slaves. The taxables in 1773 were computed to amount to 64,000: the number of Negroes and Mulattoes about 10,000.

CHAPTER IV

ENGLISH COLONIAL THEORY AND POLICY, 1651-1763

I. THE MERCANTILE SYSTEM

A Modern Interpretation, 18821

The most scholarly and philosophical view of the body of economic practices and doctrines of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, known as Mercantilism, is that of Professor Schmoller, in the essay here quoted. Professor Schmoller is professor of economic history in the University of Berlin.

Yet this very time, the second half of the sixteenth century and the seventeenth century, was an epoch which gave every inducement for an economic transformation. The way was already clear, out of the narrow circle of the small territory into the larger union of forces possible only in the great state. An immeasurable horizon horizon had been opened to the world's trade in India and America; the possession of spice colonies, and of the new gold and silver countries, promised measureless riches to those states that understood how to seize their share of the booty. But it was clear that for such purposes it was necessary to have powerful fleets, and either great trading companies or equivalent state organisations. At home, also, economic changes, of no less importance, took place. The new postal services created an altogether new system of communication. Bills of exchange, and the large exchange operations at certain fairs, together with the banks which were now making their appearance, produced an enormous and far- ́ reaching machinery of credit. The rise of the press gave birth to a new kind of public opinion, and to a crowd of newspapers which coöperated with the postal service in transforming the means of communication. Moreover, there now took place in several countriesa geographical division of labour, which broke up the old manysidedness of town industry; here the woollen manufacture was group

1 The Mercantile System and its Historical Significance. By Gustav Schmoller. In Economic Classics. Edited by W. J. Ashley (New York, 1896), 46–69, passim. Printed by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan Company.

ing itself in certain neighborhoods and around certain towns, there the linen manufacture; here the tanning trade, there the hardware trade. The old handicraft (Handwerk) began to convert itself into a domestic industry (Hausindustrie);1 the old staple trade, carried on in person by the travelling merchants, began to assume its modern shape with agents, commission dealers, and speculation.

These forces all converging impelled society to some large economic reorganisation on a broader basis, and pointed to the creation of national states with a corresponding policy. . . . What, to each in its time, gave riches and superiority first to Milan, Venice, Florence, and Genoa; then, later, to Spain and Portugal; and now to Holland, France, and England, and, to some extent, to Denmark and Sweden, was a state policy in economic matters, as superior to the territorial as that had been to the municipal. . . . States arose, forming united, and therefore strong and wealthy, economic bodies, quite different from earlier conditions; in these, quite unlike earlier times, the state organisation assisted the national economy and this the state policy; and, quite unlike earlier times too, public finance served as the bond of union between political and economic life. Herein economic and political interests went hand in hand. . The whole internal history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not only in Germany, but everywhere else, is summed up in the opposition of the economic policy of the state to that of the town, the district, and the several Estates; the whole foreign history is summed up in the opposition to one another of the separate interests of the newly rising states, each of which sought to obtain and retain its place in the circle of European nations, and in that foreign trade which now included America and India. Questions of political power were at issue which were, at the same time, questions of economic organisation. What was at stake was the creation of real political economies as unified organisms, the center of which should be, not merely a state policy reaching out in all directions, but rather the living heartbeat of a united sentiment.

Only he who thus conceives of mercantilism will understand it; in its innermost kernel it is nothing but state making — not state

1 Hausindustrie and Domestic System are terms which came to be employed in Germany and England to designate the industrial conditions destroyed or threatened by the Factory System, to which they presented the contrast that the work was done in the workman's home. But they are now used by economic historians as more or less technical terms to describe a stage in industrial development marked by other and even more important traits.