Of their last harvest I am
persuaded they will export much more. At the beginning of the century some of
these Colonies imported corn from the Mother Country. For some time past the Old
World has been fed from the New. The scarcity which you have felt would have
been a desolating famine, if this child of your old age, with a true filial
piety, with a Roman charity, [Footnote: 19] had not put the full breast of its
youthful exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent.
As to the wealth which the Colonies have drawn from the sea by their fisheries,
you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely thought those
acquisitions of value, for they seemed even to excite your envy; and yet the
spirit by which that enterprising employment has been exercised ought rather, in
my opinion, to have raised your esteem and admiration. And pray, Sir, what in
the world is equal to it? Pass by the other parts, and look at the manner in
which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery.
Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them
penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's
Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that
they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the
antipodes, and engaged under the frozen Serpent of the south.
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