Question

In early nineteenth-century American jurisprudence, legal theorists struggled to reconcile the English common-law doctrine of tidal navigation with the continent's expansive inland waterways. Under English doctrine as articulated by Lord Chief Justice Hale, the Crown held sovereign public title over submerged lands only where the tide ebbed and flowed—a geographic limitation that functionally encompassed virtually all commercially significant English waterways. In the United States, however, applying this strict tidal criterion would have excluded vast, commerce-sustaining non-tidal rivers and the Great Lakes from public sovereign ownership, leaving them susceptible to private monopolization. Consequently, in the landmark 1851 ruling *The Propeller Genesee Chief v. Fitzhugh*, the United States Supreme Court formally abandoned the tidal rule in favor of a standard based purely on actual navigability in fact. By decoupling public trust ownership from tidal ebb and flow, the Court did not intend to diminish private riparian property rights along truly non-navigable streams; rather, it sought to ensure that state sovereign jurisdiction over major transport corridors remained coextensive with the functional realities of continental trade.

Which of the following can most reasonably be inferred from the passage regarding the relationship between tidal influence and commercial significance in nineteenth-century England?