Holland, during the reigns of James I. and Charles I., had been carrying off all the commercial honours from England, and it was becoming evident that prohibitory laws were needed to stop their triumphant progress on the sea. In 1646, and again in 1650, two Acts were passed, both having the same tendency, to prevent foreign ships trading with England’s new plantations in Virginia, Bermuda, Barbadoes, “and other places in America.”(7) On the 9th of October, 1651, the celebrated Navigation Act of Cromwell came into operation. There were no half measures in that Act. It declared that no goods or commodities whatever of the growth, production, or manufacture of Asia, Africa, or America, should be imported either into Great Britain or Ireland, or any of the colonies, except in _British-built ships, owned by British subjects, and of which the master and three-fourths of the crew belonged to that country_. This, literally translated, meant that England wanted the carrying trade of everything that concerned her own well being. The next enactment went further. It provided that no goods of the growth, production, or manufacture of any country in Europe should be imported into Great Britain except in British ships, owned and navigated by British subjects, “_or in such ships as were the real property of the people of the country or place in which the goods were produced, or from which they could only be, or most usually were, exported_.” This provision was aimed at the Dutch; they had little to export. But unless one can understand the long-stifled animosity and jealousy felt in England regarding their commercial supremacy on the seas, and as regards the carrying trade, he can hardly understand why laws, which would nowadays be considered ridiculous and unjust, were so popular then. So strong had these feelings become, that when the Dutch despatched an embassy to England for the purpose of obtaining a revocation of the navigation laws, its members had to be guarded from the violence of the mob.