From this theory of empire sprang certain practical corollaries. In part to avoid allowing foreigners to benefit from the imperial trade, and to retain the carrying profits within the Empire, but mainly to build up the merchant fleet, it was decreed that all goods must be transported in vessels belonging to the mother-country or her colonies. Foreign goods, according to the theory, would have to be excluded as far as possible from the colonial markets, the products of the latter limited to the English market, and colonial manufacturing restrained so as not to compete with home-made goods, although the theory was never fully translated into practice. On the other hand, as a partial offset to such laws as were passed, which mainly redounded to the benefit of England so far as their direct results were concerned, colonial produce was, to some extent, given preferential treatment in that country, and, in some important particulars, Englishmen were forbidden to compete with the colonists. The colonies were also afforded protection against the aggression of foreign nations. No colony could possibly have remained independent. The choice was not between the English Empire and independence, but between being subject to Protestant and, as the world went then, liberal England, or to Catholic France or Spain. As we have already said, in the second half of the seventeenth century, Colbert, the great minister of Louis XIV, was applying the Mercantile doctrine to the upbuilding of the French overseas empire with a rigor that the English never attained. When he excluded all foreign vessels from the French colonial carrying-trade, there was, as yet, no sufficient French merchant fleet to serve colonial needs, and the West India planters were brought to the verge of starvation and ruin. If they “were hungry, barefooted and in rags,” writes the historian of Colbert's policy, “they must count these things as a bit of temporary suffering, to be endured for the upbuilding of French commerce. They must wait for the law of supply and demand to operate and bring them, sooner or later, an abundance from France.... But he was demanding too much. What meant the noble idea of restoring French commerce and the upbuilding of a mighty colonial empire to the planters in the West Indies, whose empty bellies were crying for food, whose nakedness demanded to be clothed?”[732] Nor were the colonial measures of the other nations less repressive.[733] Both religious and economic interests, therefore, made it desirable that the English colonies should remain within the English Empire; and it was the power of England alone which enabled them to do so. For it was not a question, for example, of the sturdy New England settlers warding off attacks from the far fewer French inhabitants of Canada. No colony was self-supporting or economically self-contained. Cut off from access to the mother-country, deprived of her protection on