profits of selling them to other countries, and the English
government the proceeds of duties upon them; and another Act
provided that imports to the colonies should only come from, or
through, England. In other words, England was to be the commercial
entrepot of the whole empire; and the regulation of imperial trade
as a whole was to belong to the English government and parliament.
To the English government also must necessarily fall the conduct
of the relations of the empire as a whole with other powers. This
commercial system was not, however, purely one-sided. If the
colonies were to send their chief products only to England, they
were at the same time to have a monopoly, or a marked advantage,
in English markets. Tobacco-growing had been for a time a
promising industry in England; it was prohibited in order that it
might not compete with the colonial product; and differential
duties were levied on the competing products of other countries
and their colonies. In short, the new policy was one of Imperial
Preference; it aimed at turning the empire into an economic unit,
of which England should be the administrative and distributing
centre. So far the English policy did not differ in kind from the
contemporary colonial policy of other countries, though it left to
the colonies a greater freedom of trade (for example, in the 'non-
enumerated articles') than was ever allowed by Spain or France, or
by the two great trading companies which controlled the foreign
possessions of Holland.

But there is one respect in which the authors of this system
differed very widely from the colonial statesmen of other
countries. Though they were anxious to organise and consolidate
the empire on the basis of a trade system, they had no desire or
intention of altering its self-governing character, or of