It will help to a comprehension of the condition of our merchant marine if we recall once more the feeling of the English public towards the colonists before the war. While statesmen like Robert Peel fostered the growth of American shipping and commerce by encouraging them in evading the navigation laws, the growth thus fostered roused a strong feeling of ill-will on the part of many patriotic Englishmen. This feeling was entirely natural and unavoidable. It was not alone that the Americans were well able to compete with the mother-country for the carrying trade of the world. Under the influence of environment the Americans were developing into a distinct people. The successful colonial was often and perhaps usually self-assertive and boastful; he was necessarily aggressive. Then, too, he showed a lack of deference in the presence of rank that seemed shocking to the nobility. Men who were doing the world's work in the American wilderness made no efforts to conceal their contempt for royal governors, and the influential part of the people of England accepted the complaining letters of these baffled governors as accurate characterizations of the American people. Because of a sort of race prejudice thus produced, the measures of the king, when coercion was attempted, were heartily approved by the majority of the English people. Then, during the war, the expelled American loyalists had _ex parte_ stories to tell that added indignation to animosity. The successful American cruisers added to the ill feeling. At the same time the British authorities observed a tendency among the foremost hands in the British navy that was not a little alarming. While their navy lost, in the years from 1776 to 1780, 19,788 men through disease and battle, no less than 42,069 deserted. Some of these deserters were, of course, Americans who had been impressed, but many a good British tar learned about the opportunities in the new land and made haste to go to meet them. In short, it was through natural and unavoidable causes that the influential Britons came to regard their "American cousins" with a feeling of, say, intense animosity not wholly unmingled with apprehension.