NAVIGATION SYSTEM, THE, the body of statute descending from the Navigation Act of 1651, by which goods carried to or from any dominion of the Commonwealth must be carried in Commonwealth-built and Commonwealth-crewed shipping, and certain enumerated commodities of the Western Provinces — sugar, tobacco, indigo, and their several successors on the schedule as amended — may be landed at no port outside the Commonwealth's own without first passing through a Home port and paying duty there. It is worth recording, since foreign commentators not infrequently suppose otherwise, that the system's mercantile jealousy is native to this republic and was not inherited from any crowned predecessor: the Act of 1651 was the Rump's own measure, passed nine years before the Settlement, and every Frame since adopted has left its principle substantially untouched.
The economic case for the system rests on figures this contributor finds, on the whole, more equivocal than its parliamentary defenders generally allow. The Commonwealth's own merchant marine has certainly grown, under the system's protection, to a tonnage disproportionate to the republic's population; whether that growth represents a net gain to the Commonwealth as a whole, or merely a transfer from the Western planter who receives a lower price for his enumerated crop than an open market would return him, to the Home shipowner who carries it, is a question the customs ledgers answer rather more equivocally than either interest cares to admit in the Assembly's own debates. The duty schedule has been revised downward five times since 1660, in every instance under pressure from the Western delegation rather than upon any home initiative, a pattern this contributor takes to be fairly conclusive evidence of where the greater burden of the system has actually fallen.
That burden was stated in its plainest terms in the Remonstrance of the Plantations (q.v.) of the sixteen-eighties, whose complaint of "customs without a voice" was, at bottom, a complaint against this system specifically rather than against the Commonwealth's government in the general. The Second Frame (q.v.) that answered the Remonstrance gave the Western Provinces a voice in the body that set the schedule; it did not repeal the schedule itself, and the enumerated list, though shortened, remains in force. The Commonwealth's merchant fleet is, by any measure, among the two or three largest afloat, and this contributor does not doubt that the Navigation System has had a great deal to do with making it so; she doubts rather more whether the Western planter who still sells his sugar at a Home port's price has ever found much comfort in that distinction. (M. S. W.)