The first and most elementary duty of an independent community, the one condition without which it cannot be independent, is providing for its own defence. The American colonies claimed in reality political independence, at any rate as far as internal matters were concerned; but they did not admit, except to a limited extent, that it was their duty to provide against foreign invasion. That duty, in their eyes, devolved upon the mother country because it was the mother country; because it was held that the mother country derived more advantage from the colonies than--apart from defence--the colonies derived from her; and because the mother country dictated the foreign policy of the Empire; in common parlance, it called the tune and therefore, it was argued, should pay the piper. [Sidenote: The Navigation Acts an inadequate return for the charge imposed on the mother country for defending the colonies.] The Navigation laws, the commercial restrictions imposed by Great Britain on her colonies, were assumed to represent the price which the colonies paid in return for the protection which the mother country gave or professed to give to the colonies; and these same laws and restrictions, viewed in the light of later times, have been held to be the burden of oppression which was greater than the colonies could bear. Adam Smith, the writer who most forcibly exposed the unsoundness of the old mercantile system, also demonstrated most conclusively that that system was universal in the eighteenth century; that it was less oppressively applied by England than by other countries which owned colonies; that under it, if the colonies were restricted in trade, they were also in receipt of bounties; and lastly, that the undoubted disadvantages which were the result of the system were shared by the mother country with the colonies, though they weighed more heavily upon the colonies than on the mother country, and were to the colonies ‘impertinent badges of slavery’. The conclusion to be drawn is that, assuming Great Britain to have adequately discharged the duty of protecting the colonies, she was not adequately paid for doing so by the results of the mercantile system. [Sidenote: (2) Did Great Britain neglect the defence of the North American colonies?]