The fair account of the matter is this.  Our trade had, as we have just seen, increased to so astonishing a degree in 1761, as to employ British and foreign ships to the amount of 707,659 tons, which is 149,500 more than we employed in the last year of the peace.—­Thus our trade increased more than a fifth; our British navigation had increased likewise with this astonishing increase of trade, but was not able to keep pace with it; and we added about 120,000 tons of foreign shipping to the 60,000, which had been employed in the last year of the peace.  Whatever happened to our shipping in the former years of the war, this would be no true state of the case at the time of the treaty.  If we had lost something in the beginning, we had then recovered, and more than recovered, all our losses.  Such is the ground of the doleful complaints of the author, that the carrying trade was wholly engrossed by the neutral nations.

I have done fairly, and even very moderately, in taking this year, and not his average, as the standard of what might be expected in future, had the war continued.  The author will be compelled to allow it, unless he undertakes to show; first, that the possession of Canada, Martinico, Guadaloupe, Grenada, the Havannah, the Philippines, the whole African trade, the whole East India trade, and the whole Newfoundland fishery, had no certain inevitable tendency to increase the British shipping; unless, in the second place, he can prove that those trades were, or might be, by law or indulgence, carried on in foreign vessels; and unless, thirdly, he can demonstrate that the premium of insurance on British ships was rising as the war continued.  He can prove not one of these points.  I will show him a fact more that is mortal to his assertions.  It is the state of our shipping in 1762.  The author had his reasons for stopping short at the preceding year.  It would have appeared, had he proceeded farther, that our tonnage was in a course of uniform augmentation, owing to the freight derived from our foreign conquests, and to the perfect security of our navigation from our clear and decided superiority at sea.  This, I say, would have appeared from the state of the two years:—­

1761.  British 527,557 tons. 1762.  Ditto 559,537 tons. 1761.  Foreign 180,102 tons. 1762.  Ditto 129,502 tons.

The two last years of the peace were in no degree equal to these.  Much of the navigation of 1763 was also owing to the war; this is manifest from the large part of it employed in the carriage from the ceded islands, with which the communication still continued open.  No such circumstances of glory and advantage ever attended upon a war.  Too happy will be our lot, if we should again be forced into a war, to behold anything that shall resemble them; and if we were not then the better for them, it is net in the ordinary course of God’s providence to mend our condition.