to import our tools free, they would beat us in everything else for which they had the raw materials in plenty.  Eden and Smith seem to have exchanged several letters on this subject, but none of them remain except the following one from Smith, in which he declares that it would be an injustice to our own colonies to restrict their trade with the United States merely to benefit Irish fish-curers or English hatters, and to be bad policy to impose special discouragements on the trade of one foreign nation which are not imposed on the trade of others.  His argument is not, it will be observed, for free trade, which he perhaps thought then impracticable, but merely for equality of treatment,—­equality of treatment between the British subject in Canada and the British subject in England, and equality of treatment between the American nation and the Russian, or French, or Spanish.

DEAR SIR—­If the Americans really mean to subject the goods of all different nations to the same duties and to grant them the same indulgence, they set an example of good sense which all other nations ought to imitate.  At any rate it is certainly just that their goods, their naval stores for example, should be subjected to the same duties to which we subject those of Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, and that we should treat them as they mean to treat us and all other nations.

What degree of commercial connection we should allow between the remaining colonies, whether in North America or the West Indies, and the United States may to some people appear a more difficult question.  My own opinion is that it should be allowed to go on as before, and whatever inconveniences result from this freedom may be remedied as they occur.  The lumber and provisions of the United States are more necessary to our West India Islands than the rum and sugar of the latter are to the former.  Any interruption or restraint of commerce would hurt our loyal much more than our revolted subjects.  Canada and Nova Scotia cannot justly be refused at least the same freedom of commerce which we grant to the United States.

I suspect the Americans do not mean what they say.  I have seen a Revenue Act of South Carolina by which two shillings are laid upon every hundredweight of brown sugar imported from the British plantations, and only eighteenpence upon that imported from any foreign colony.  Upon every pound of refined sugar from the former one penny, from the latter one halfpenny.  Upon every gallon of French wine twopence; of Spanish wine threepence; of Portuguese wine fourpence.

I have little anxiety about what becomes of the American commerce.  By an equality of treatment of all nations we must soon open a commerce with the neighbouring nations of Europe infinitely more advantageous than that of so distant a country as America.  This is an immense subject upon which when I wrote to you last I intended to have sent you a letter of many sheets,