Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: N- II. MEMORIAL ON THE RULE OF THE WAR OF 1756. To the President of the United States, and the Senate and IL . ofeReprestntatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled: THE MEMORIAL OF THE MERCHANTS AND TRADERS OF THE CITY OF BALTIMORE. Your memorialists beg leave respectfully to submit to your consideration the following statement and reflections, produced by the situation of our public affairs, in a high degree critical and perilous, and peculiarly affecting the commerce of their country. In the early part of the late war between Great Britain and France, the former undertook to prohibit neutral nations from all trade whatsoever with the colonies of the latter. This exorbitant pretension was not long persisted in. It was soon qualified in favour of a direct trade between the United and these colonies, and some years afterwards was further relaxed in favour of European neutrals. The United States being thus admitted, by the express acknowledgment of Great Britain, to a direct trade, without limit, between their own ports and the colonies of the opposite belligerents, another trade naturally and necessarily grew out of it, or rathei formed one of its principal objects and inducement- The surplus colonial produce, beyond our own consumption, imported here, was to be carried elsewhere for a market; and il was accordingly carried to Europe, sometimes by the original importer, sometimes by other American merchants, either in the vessels in which the importation was made, or in others. In th course of this traffic, it was understood to be the .sense of Great Britain, and was explicitly declared by her courts of prize, that, although she had not expressly allowed to the merchants of theUnited States, by the letter of her relaxations, and immediate trade betw...