men.  These are known to have cost the government fifteen pounds each, or one hundred and seventy-six thousand five hundred and eighty pounds, in the whole, and that, to employ the principal part of them from three to four months only.  The northern ships have brought home twenty, and the southern sixty tons of oil, on an average; making eighty-six hundred and forty tons.  Every ton of oil, then, has cost the government twenty pounds in bounty.  Still, if they can beat, us out of the field, and have it to themselves, they will think their money well employed.  If France undertakes, solely, the competition against them, she must do it at equal expense.  The trade is too poor to support itself.  The eighty-five ships, necessary to supply even her present consumption, bountied, as the English are, will require a sacrifice of twelve hundred and eighty-five thousand two hundred livres a year, to maintain three thousand five hundred and seventy seamen, and that, a part of the year only; and if she will put it to twelve thousand men, in competition with England, she must sacrifice, as they do, four or five millions a year.  The same number of men might, with the same bounty, be kept in as constant employ, carrying stone from Bayonne to Cherburg, or coal from Newcastle to Havre, in which navigations they would be always at hand, and become as good seamen.  The English consider among their best sailors, those employed to carry coal from Newcastle to London.  France cannot expect to raise her fishery, even to the supply of her own consumption, in one year, or in several years.  Is it not better, then, by keeping her ports open to the United States, to enable them to aid in maintaining the field against the common adversary, till she shall be in condition to take it herself, and to supply her own wants?  Otherwise her supplies must aliment that very force, which is keeping her under.  On our part, we can never be dangerous competitors to France.  The extent to which we can exercise this fishery, is limited to that of the barren island of Nantucket, and a few similar barren spots; its duration, to the pleasure of this government, as we have no other market.  A material observation must be added here:  sudden vicissitudes of opening and shutting ports, do little injury to merchants settled on the opposite coast, watching for the opening, like the return of a tide, and ready to enter with it.  But they ruin the adventurer, whose distance requires six months’ notice.  Those who are now arriving from America, in consequence of the Arret of December the 29th, will consider it as the false light which has led them to their ruin.  They will be apt to say, that they come to the ports of France by invitation of that Arret, that the subsequent one of September the 28th, which drives them from those ports, founds itself on a single principle, viz. ’that the prohibition of foreign oils is the most useful encouragement which can be given to that branch of industry.’  They will say, that, if this be a true principle, it was as true on the 29th of December 1787, as on the 20th of September, 1788:  it was then weighed against other motives, judged weaker and overruled, and it is hard it should be now revived, to ruin them.