notorious, it was their policy to hold out as few temptations to smuggling as possible, by keeping the duties as nearly as they could on a balance with the risk.  On these principles they made many alterations in the port-duties of 1764, both in the mode and in the quantity.  The author has not attempted to prove them erroneous.  He complains enough to show that he is in an ill-humor, not that his adversaries have done amiss.

As to the regulations which were merely relative to commerce, many were then made; and they were all made upon this principle, that many of the colonies, and those some of the most abounding in people, were so situated as to have very few means of traffic with this country.  It became therefore our interest to let them into as much foreign trade as could be given them without interfering with our own; and to secure by every method the returns to the mother country.  Without some such scheme of enlargement, it was obvious that any benefit we could expect from these colonies must be extremely limited.  Accordingly many facilities were given to their trade with the foreign plantations, and with the southern parts of Europe.  As to the confining the returns to this country, administration saw the mischief and folly of a plan of indiscriminate restraint.  They applied their remedy to that part where the disease existed, and to that only:  on this idea they established regulations, far more likely to check the dangerous, clandestine trade with Hamburg and Holland, than this author’s friends, or any of their predecessors had ever done.

The friends of the author have a method surely a little whimsical in all this sort of discussions.  They have made an innumerable multitude of commercial regulations, at which the trade of England exclaimed with one voice, and many of which have been altered on the unanimous opinion of that trade.  Still they go on, just as before, in a sort of droning panegyric on themselves, talking of these regulations as prodigies of wisdom; and, instead of appealing to those who are most affected and the best judges, they turn round in a perpetual circle of their own reasonings and pretences; they hand you over from one of their own pamphlets to another:  “See,” say they, “this demonstrated in the ‘Regulations of the Colonies.’” “See this satisfactorily proved in ’The Considerations.’” By and by we shall have another:  “See for this ’The State of the Nation.’” I wish to take another method in vindicating the opposite system.  I refer to the petitions of merchants for these regulations; to their thanks when they were obtained; and to the strong and grateful sense they have ever since expressed of the benefits received under that administration.