The Mercantile System and its Historical Significance [24]
colonial trade. These Dutch, so lauded by the naif free-trader of our day on account of the low customs-duties of their early days, were from the first the sternest and most warlike of monopolists after the mercantilist fashion that the world has ever seen. As they suffered no trading ship, whether European or Asiatic, in East Indian waters, without a Dutch pass to be bought only with gold; as by force of arms and by treaty they kept the Belgian port, Antwerp, shut up against commerce; as they crushed the Prussian colony in Africa, and countless other settlements of other nations; so at home they forbade all herring-fishers to take their wares to any but the Dutch market, and prohibited their passing into foreign service, or taking to foreign countries the implements of their craft. Although at the beginning they had low duties on imports and exports, they resorted constantly to arbitrary prohibitions whenever they thought they could thereby further Dutch interests; in 1671 they imposed the heaviest duties on French goods; and, in the eighteenth century, when they had become too pusillanimous to wage war for their commercial ends, they resorted to the extremest protectionism. In the time of their prosperity they were carrying on war well-nigh all the time, and war for commercial ends; and they shewed more skill than any other state, in the seventeenth century, in getting out of their wars fresh commercial advantages. Their obstinate pursuit of monopoly gave rise to England's navigation law and Colbert's tariff; and attracted England and France themselves towards a like policy of pursuing narrowly mercantilist objects by force of arms. The bloody and costly wars of England with the Dutch were, Noorden tells us, at bottom nothing but a duel over the maintenance of the Navigation Acts. The French invasion of Holland (1672) was an answer to their foolish and extravagant reprisals against Colbert's tariff. The War of the Spanish Succession, like the War of the Grand Alliance in 1689-1697, was, primarily, the struggle of England and Holland, in concert, against the growing industrial and commercial preponderance of France, and against the danger of the union of French trade with the colonial power of Spain.(34*) It was a struggle for the lucrative Spanish-American trade which mainly occasioned the antagonism of England and France till after the middle of the eighteenth century. The supply of the Spanish-American colonies with European manufactures could only take place by means of the great West Indian smuggling trade, or through Spain, i.e. the Spanish port-towns. As Spanish industry supplied only a part of the need, the question was, whom Spain. would allow to share in the trade, - whether it would wink at smuggling, and, if so, to what extent and by whom; whether France could circumvent England, or England France, in Spain and the West Indies. The war, also, of England with Spain from 1739 to 1748, - which, in 1744, turned itself into a war with Spain and France, - had, in the main, no other object than this, to obtain a free course for the English smuggling trade with Spanish America; it was generally nicknamed by public opinion "the Smuggler's War." The Seven Years' War had its origin, as everyone knows, in the colonial rivalry of England and France in North America. Whether the Ohio and Mississippi should furnish the Romance race or the Teutonic with a field for colonisation and trade, whether maritime and commercial supremacy for the next hundred or two hundred years should belong to England or France, - that was the far-reaching economic quarrel into which the great king of Prussia was drawn because he would not suffer his old ally France to attack his old enemy England in Hanover, i.e. in Germany. In defending Germany's neutrality in this commercial and colonial war, he was drawn into it himself; and when his brave troops defeated the French at Rossbach (1757) and elsewhere, they decided at the same time the great questions of the world's trade and of future colonial development. Without the victories of the Prussian