The statesmen of both France and England accepted the same theory about the use colonies should be put to,—the doctrine and practice everywhere accepted in their day. Colonies were to be used to enrich the countries which possessed them. They should send their characteristic native products to the country which had established them, and for the most part to her alone, and should take her manufactures in exchange; trade nowhere else to her disadvantage; and do and make nothing which could bring them into competition with her merchants and manufacturers. But England applied this theory in one way, France in another. It was provoking enough to the English colonists in America to have, in many a petty matter, to evade the exacting Navigation Acts, which restricted their trade and obliged them to buy manufactured goods at prices fixed by the English merchants. It a little cramped and irritated them that they were forbidden to manufacture now this and now that, though the material lay at their very doors, because English manufacturers wished their competition shut out. Restriction was added to restriction. In 1706, naval stores and rice, which the Carolinas were learning to produce to their increasing profit, were added to the list of products which must be sent to England only; and in 1722 copper and furs. In 1732 the manufacture of beaver hats was forbidden, and in 1750 the maintenance of iron furnaces or slit mills. But there was always an effort made at reciprocal advantage. Though the colonies were forbidden to manufacture their iron ores, their bar and pig iron was admitted into England free of duty, and Swedish iron, which might have undersold it, was held off by a heavy tariff, to the manifest advantage of Maryland and Virginia. Though the rice of the Carolinas for a time got admission to market only through the English middlemen, their naval stores were exported under a heavy bounty; and in 1730, when the restriction laid on the rice trade pinched too shrewdly, it was removed with regard to Portugal, the chief European market open to it. Parliament had generally an eye to building up the trade of the colonies as well as to controlling it. [Illustration: Plan of the CITY OF NEW YORK 1767.]