The restoration to Sweden of the Baltic provinces is required by the commercial as well as the political interest of Great Britain. Such is the pith of our author’s argument:
“Trade is become the very life of our State; and what food is to life naval stores are to a fleet. The whole trade we drive with all the other nations of the earth, at best, is but lucrative; this, of the north, is indispensably needful, and may not be improperly termed the sacra embole of Great Britain, as being its chiefest foreign vent, for the support of all our trade, and our safety at home. As woollen manufactures and minerals are the staple commodities of Great Britain,
so are likewise naval stores those of Muscovy, as also of all those very provinces in the Baltic, which the Czar has so lately wrested from the crown of Sweden. Since those provinces have been in the Czar’s possession, Pernau is entirely waste. At Revel we have not one British merchant left, and all the trade which was formerly at Narva, is now brought to Petersburg.... The Swede could never possibly engross the trade of our subjects, because those seaports in his hands were but so many thoroughfares from whence these commodities were uttered, the places of their produce or manufacture lying behind those ports, in the dominions of the Czar. But, if left to the Czar, these Baltic ports are no more thoroughfares, but peculiar magazines from the inland countries of the Czar’s own dominions. Having already Archangel in the White Sea, to leave him but any seaport in the Baltic were to put no less in his hands than the two keys of the general magazines of all the naval stores of Europe: it being known, that Danes, Swedes, Poles and Prussians have but single and distinct branches of those commodities in their several dominions If the Czar should thus engross “the supply of what we cannot do without, where then is our fleet? Or, indeed, where is the security for all our trade to any part of the earth besides?”