Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/305

 *vas, and other articles requisite for the conduct of their business, and insisted on licenses being taken out, and bonds given to the commissioners of customs for the construction and navigation of their ships.

Against these and other special burdens British shipowners now loudly, and not without cause, complained. They remarked, with much force, that it was of the last importance that their vessels should trade on equal terms with those of other nations, but that "so long as they continued to be burthened with tonnage, convoy, port-duties, extra insurance, heavy taxes for docks, canals, tunnels, and a thousand other water-brain schemes, they will continue to drag on a miserable existence, till even the profitable concerns of ship-breaking shall be seen no more." Had their complaints been confined to the special burdens with which they were afflicted, the sympathy of the country would have gone with them; but when they formed an association, which had for its object the maintenance of the old navigation laws in their original integrity, they received no support even from Mr. Pitt, a leading member of whose Administration declared "that however wise and salutary the navigation laws might have been in the infancy of our commerce, he did not perceive the efficacy of them at present, and the necessity of strictly adhering to their original provisions." This truth was, indeed, at last beginning to break forth upon the world; but it still required many years to convert the shipowners to what they not unnaturally regarded as a heretical doctrine.