Yet President Jefferson had reason to weigh long and soberly the pointed remark with which the King’s Advocate began his report,--that the general principle with respect to the colonial trade had been to a certain extent relaxed in consideration of the present state of commerce. No doubt the British pretension, as a matter of international law, was outrageous. The so-called rule of 1756 was neither more nor less than a rule of force; but when was international law itself anything more than a law of force? The moment a nation found itself unable to show some kind of physical defence for its protection, the wisdom of Grotius and Bynkershoek could not prevent it from being plundered; and how could President Jefferson complain merely because American ships were forbidden by England to carry French sugars to France, when he looked on without a protest while England and France committed much greater outrages on every other country within their reach? President Jefferson believed that the United States had ample means to resist any British pretension. As his letters to Paine and Logan showed, he felt that European Powers could be controlled through the interests of commerce.[231] He was the more firmly convinced by the extraordinary concessions which Pitt had made, and by the steady encouragement he gave to the American merchant. Jefferson felt sure that England could not afford to sacrifice a trade of some forty million dollars, and that her colonies could not exist without access to the American market. What need to spend millions on a navy, when Congress, as Jefferson believed, already grasped England by the throat, and could suffocate her by a mere turn of the wrist! This reasoning had much in its favor. To Pitt the value of the American trade at a time of war with France and Spain was immense; and when taken in connection with the dependence of the West Indian colonies on America, it made a combination of British interests centring in the United States which much exceeded the entire value of all England’s other branches of foreign commerce. Its prospective value was still greater if things should remain as they were, and if England should continue to undersell all rivals in articles of general manufacture. England could well afford to lose great sums of money in the form of neutral freights rather than drive Congress to a protective system which should create manufactures of cotton, woollen, and iron. These were motives which had their share in the civility with which England treated America; and year by year their influence should naturally have increased.