Legislation is merely the expression of the nation’s contemporary fears, and in the long series of maritime Acts from the fourteenth century onwards we can see the national nervousness of the time lest the foreigner should dominate the success of our Mercantile Marine. We have already seen Edward I styling himself “Sovereign of the Seas.” Then in the last years of the fourteenth century we have what was the first of the Navigation Acts. The basic aim was to exclude the ships, seamen and trade of the foreigner and to encourage those of our country. We will not bore the reader with a legal dissertation, but it will help us to understand the difficulties of the time if, very briefly, we show how the State was helping the subject of our study. During the reigns of Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth there was legislation dealing with the privileges of English shipping. At a later date the claim to the sovereignty of the seas was expressed by compelling the Flemish subjects of Philip, who married our Queen Mary, to pay a fine and an annual rent of £1000 for twenty-one years’ lease of the fishing near the north Irish coast, whilst a similar lease with similar conditions was granted by Mary to the Hanseatics. Without a licence foreign subjects were forbidden to fish in English waters, though with the decline of English sea-power in the seventeenth century foreigners ceased to be bound by these claims. The doctrine of the “Dominion of the Seas” is inseparably bound up in the growth of our Mercantile Marine and our fishing industry. Matters reach a crisis in the dispute, and then the discussion is settled by an appeal to force in the shape of war. The Anglo-Dutch wars were fundamentally caused by the herring fisheries and the Mercantile Marines of the two nations. Every other reason was entirely artificial and subservient. Whether the seas could be free to all everywhere to trade, whether the fisherman could shoot his nets where he liked—that is the whole matter in a nutshell. And the more ships that were built for trade or fishing, the more serious the crisis developed. Proportionately the value of a navy becomes greater, and thus the two services are bound to become less and less similar, as greater commercial demands are made on the one and purely warlike requirements are insisted on for the other.