But first I must observe, I am much less solicitous whether his fact be true or no, than whether his principle is well established.  Cases are dead things, principles are living and productive.  I affirm then, that, if in time of war our trade had the good fortune to increase, and at the same time a large, nay the largest, proportion of carriage had been engrossed by neutral nations, it ought not in itself to have been considered as a circumstance of distress.  War is a time of inconvenience to trade; in general it must be straitened, and must find its way as it can.  It is often happy for nations that they are able to call in neutral navigation.  They all aim at it.  France endeavored at it, but could not compass it.  Will this author say, that, in a war with Spain, such an assistance would not be of absolute necessity? that it would not be the most gross of all follies to refuse it?

In the next place, his method of stating a medium of six years of war, and six years of peace, to decide this question, is altogether unfair.  To say, in derogation of the advantages of a war, that navigation is not equal to what it was in time of peace, is what hitherto has never been heard of.  No war ever bore that test but the war which he so bitterly laments.  One may lay it down as a maxim, that an average estimate of an object in a steady course of rising or of falling, must in its nature be an unfair one; more particularly if the cause of the rise or fall be visible, and its continuance in any degree probable.  Average estimates are never just but when the object fluctuates, and no reason can be assigned why it should not continue still to fluctuate.  The author chooses to allow nothing at all for this:  he has taken an average of six years of the war.  He knew, for everybody knows, that the first three years were on the whole rather unsuccessful; and that, in consequence of this ill success, trade sunk, and navigation declined with it; but that grand delusion of the three last years turned the scale in our favor.  At the beginning of that war (as in the commencement of every war), traders were struck with a sort of panic.  Many went out of the freighting business.  But by degrees, as the war continued, the terror wore off; the danger came to be better appreciated, and better provided against; our trade was carried on in large fleets, under regular convoys, and with great safety.  The freighting business revived.  The ships were fewer, but much larger; and though the number decreased, the tonnage was vastly augmented:  insomuch that in 1761 the British shipping had risen by the author’s own account to 527,557 tons.—­In the last year he has given us of the peace, it amounted to no more than 494,772; that is, in the last year of the war it was 32,785 tons more than in the correspondent year of his peace average.  No year of the peace exceeded it except one, and that but little.