"Every one knows that Great Britain drew great quantities of all these commodities from the northern nations. It is not less certain, that she drew some of all of them from her late Colonies. But these commodities are so bulky, and of so little intrinsic value, that it was utterly impossible for the Americans to transport them across the Atlantic so cheap as the nations of Europe, which wanted them, and Great Britain in particular, could import them from the northern nations. This kind of commerce, therefore, would long since have utterly failed, and been left free for those nations, if, to prevent this, Great Britain had not adopted the policy of granting large bounties upon all those commodities, iron alone excepted, when imported into Great Britain from America. It was her interest to do this, because at the same time, that she was thereby encouraging the commerce of her Colonies, she was rendering a great benefit to her own manufactures, in which she paid the Americans for those commodities, so that her bounties turned to the account of both parts of the Empire at once. Besides, they made her less dependent upon any foreign nations for those commodities, and she was too well acquainted with her commercial and political interests ever to lose sight of that object. She could not grant a bounty upon iron without injuring her own mines; she therefore adopted the method of exempting the iron of America from duties, which she imposed upon all the iron imported from any foreign country, and these duties being considerable, they had a like effect upon American iron, as the bounties had upon the other commodities. This system was calculated gradually to destroy the commerce of the northern nations with Great Britain.