[Illustration: AN ENGLISH FLEET IN 1732] The main lines of trade ran, after all, straight to the mother country, and were protected when there was need by English fleets. Both the laws of Parliament and their own interest bound the trade of the colonies to England. The Navigation Act of 1660, in force now these forty years, forbade all trade with the colonies except in English bottoms; forbade also the shipment of their tobacco and wool anywhither but to England itself; and an act of 1663 forbade the importation of anything at all except out of England, which, it was then once for all determined, must be the _entrepôt_ and place of staple for all foreign trade. It was determined that, if there were to be middlemen’s profits, the middlemen should be English, and that the carrying trade of England and her colonies should be English, not Dutch. It was the Dutch against whom the acts were aimed. Dutch ships cost less in the building than ships built in England; the Dutch merchantmen could afford to charge lower rates of freight than English skippers; and the statesmen of King Charles, deeming Holland their chief competitor upon the seas and in the markets of the world, meant to cut the rivalry short by statute, so far as the English realm was concerned. Fortunately the interests of the colonists themselves wore easily enough the harness of the acts. For a while it went very hard in Virginia, it is true, to pay English freight rates on every shipment of tobacco, the colony’s chief staple, and to sell only through English middlemen, to the exclusion of the accommodating Dutch and all competition. Trade touched nothing greater than the tobacco crop. Virginia supplied in that alone a full half of all the exports of the colonies. Her planters sharply resented “that severe act of Parliament which excludes us from having any commerce with any nation in Europe but our own”; for it seemed to put upon them a special burden. “We cannot add to our plantation any commodity that grows out of it, as olive trees, cotton, or vines,” complained Sir William Berkeley very bluntly to the government in 1671. “Besides this, we cannot procure any skilful men for one now hopeful commodity, silk: for it is not lawful for us to carry a pipe stave or a barrel of corn to any place in Europe out of the King’s dominions. If this were for his Majesty’s service or the good of his subjects, we should not repine, whatever our sufferings are for it; but on my soul, it is the contrary for both.” But the thing was eased for them at last when they began to see how their interest really lay. They had almost a monopoly of the English market, for Spanish tobacco was kept out by high duties, the planting of tobacco in England, begun on no mean scale in the west midland counties in the days of the Protectorate, was prohibited by law, and a rebate of duties on all tobacco re-exported to the continent quickened the trade with the northern countries of