America a Nation of Customers, Britain a Nation of Shopkeepers

¹⁴⁹ Creating a great empire of customers may appear as a project good only for a nation of shopkeepers.

In reality, it is not a good project for a nation of shopkeepers.

• But it is extremely good for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.
• That government imagines creating such an empire will be advantageous.

If you propose to a shopkeeper that you will buy all your clothes from his shop if he buys you an estate, he will not like your proposal.

• But if another person buys you an estate and urged you to buy all your clothes from the shopkeeper, the shopkeeper would be much obliged to that person.

Some of England’s subjects were uneasy at home.

She purchased for them a great estate in a distant country.

• The price was very small.
• 30 years purchase is the present ordinary price of land.

Instead of 30 years purchase, its price was the cost of:

• making the first discovery
• surveying the coast
• taking a fictitious possession of the country

The land was good and wide.

The cultivators had plenty of good ground to work on.

• For some time, they were free to sell their produce where they pleased.
• In 30 or 40 years (between 1620 and 1660), they became so numerous and thriving that English shopkeepers and traders wished to monopolize the American trade.

Those shopkeepers did not pay any part of the original purchase-money or the subsequent expence of improvement.

• Yet they petitioned the parliament that American cultivators should be confined to their shop.

• The cultivators would then:

  • buy all the European goods that they wanted from that shop
  • sell all their produce to that shop

The shopkeepers did not find convenient to buy all of the produce of those cultivators because some of it, when imported into England, competed with their trades at home.

• The traders proposed that the competing American produce should be confined to countries south of Cape Finisterre in Spain.
• “A clause in the famous act of navigation established this truly shopkeeper proposal into a law.”

¹⁵⁰ The maintenance of this monopoly was the sole end and purpose of British dominion over her colonies.

In this exclusive trade consists the great advantage of provinces, which

Those dependent colonies have never yet afforded either a revenue or a military force to support the civil government or defend Great Britain.

• The monopoly is the sole fruit which has been gathered from that dependence.

British spending for her colonies is really spending to support this monopoly.

Before the start of the present disturbances, the cost of the ordinary peace establishment in the colonies amounted to:

• the pay of 20 foot regiments
• the cost of the artillery, stores, and their extraordinary provisions
• the cost of a big naval force which guarded the immense coast of North America and the West Indian islands from foreign smuggling

This whole cost was charged to Great Britain.

• It was the smallest cost of the dominion of the colonies to Great Britain.

The total cost of this dominion is:

• This annual cost of this peace establishment, plus
• The interest of previous expences of Great Britain in defending them, plus
• The whole cost of the American Revolutionary War and the Seven Years’ War

The American Revolutionary War was a colony quarrel.

• Its whole global cost should justly be charged to the colonies.
  • It amounted to more than 90 million sterling which included:
    • a new debt
    • the 2 shillings in the pound additional land tax
    • the sums which were borrowed every year from the sinking fund.

The War of Jenkins Ear which began in 1739 was principally a colony quarrel.

• “Its principal object was to prevent the search of the colony ships which carried on a contraband trade with the Spanish Main.”

In reality, this whole cost is a bounty given to support a monopoly. Its pretended purpose was:

• to encourage manufactures
• to increase British commerce

Its real effect was:

• to raise mercantile profits
• to enable our merchants to turn their capital into a trade where the returns are more slow and distant than other trades

These two events would have been worth giving a bounty to in order to prevent, not support.