Prohibitions were found to be ineffective, however, and were a serious hindrance to some branches of commerce, that with the East especially, in which the foreigners demanded considerable supplies of the precious metals. The export of bullion, therefore, was generally permitted, and the government contented itself with a regulation of the commerce in merchandise which, it hoped, would bring more bullion into the country than was carried out. =192. Features of the mercantile system; restriction of imports.=—If the student will remember that the main object of the mercantile system, as it was expressed in the commercial policy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was to increase the credits in a country’s foreign trade, and diminish the debits, so as to get a balance in cash, the main features of the policy will be easily intelligible. In the first place, imports were discouraged. A Spanish mercantilist thought that his country suffered “an infinite wrong” from the importation of fish from abroad, which, by his reckoning, cost the country three million piasters a year; he suggested either that home fisheries should be built up so that the money need not leave the country, or that permission be obtained from the Pope to eat meat on Saturdays, which would diminish the necessity for importation. A typical example of the ideas underlying the policy is furnished by an appeal of the English salt-makers in the seventeenth century, urging that the use of foreign salt in the curing of fish be prohibited on the ground that it was the “wisdom of a kingdom or nation to prevent the importation of any manufacture from abroad which might be a detriment to their own at home, for if the coin of the nation be carried out to pay for foreign manufactures and our own people left unemployed, then in case a war happen with our potent neighbours, the people are incapacitated to pay taxes for the support of the same.” Mercantilism and modern protectionism easily ran together, as is apparent in the quotation, but the spirit animating restrictions was in this period mainly mercantilist, based, that is, on consideration of the flow of precious metals. The methods of tariff regulation, moreover, differed from those of modern protectionism; statesmen did not, in most cases, attempt to scale the duties so as just to balance the advantages of the foreign producer, but resorted to downright prohibition of the wares which they desired to exclude from the home market.