Admit however that a great part of our export, though nothing is more remote from fact, was owing to the supply of our fleets and armies; was it not something?—­was it not peculiarly fortunate for a nation, that she was able from her own bosom to contribute largely to the supply of her armies militating in so many distant countries?  The author allows that France did not enjoy the same advantages.  But it is remarkable, throughout his whole book, that those circumstances which have ever been considered as great benefits, and decisive proofs of national superiority, are, when in our hands, taken either in diminution of some other apparent advantage, or even sometimes as positive misfortunes.  The optics of that politician must be of a strange conformation, who beholds everything in this distorted shape.

So far as to our trade.  With regard to our navigation, he is still more uneasy at our situation, and still more fallacious in his state of it.  In his text, he affirms it “to have been entirely engrossed by the neutral nations."[48] This he asserts roundly and boldly, and without the least concern; although it cost no more than a single glance of the eye upon his own margin to see the full refutation of this assertion.  His own account proves against him, that, in the year 1761, the British shipping amounted to 527,557 tons,—­the foreign to no more than 180,102.  The medium of his six years British, 2,449,555 tons,—­foreign only 906,690.  This state (his own) demonstrates that the neutral nations did not entirely engross our navigation.

I am willing from a strain of candor to admit that this author speaks at random; that he is only slovenly and inaccurate, and not fallacious.  In matters of account, however, this want of care is not excusable; and the difference between neutral nations entirely engrossing our navigation, and being only subsidiary to a vastly augmented trade, makes a most material difference to his argument.  From that principle of fairness, though the author speaks otherwise, I am willing to suppose he means no more than that our navigation had so declined as to alarm us with the probable loss of this valuable object.  I shall however show, that his whole proposition, whatever modifications he may please to give it, is without foundation; that our navigation had not decreased; that, on the contrary, it had greatly increased in the war; that it had increased by the war; and that it was probable the same cause would continue to augment it to a still greater height; to what an height it is hard to say, had our success continued.