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 which were crowded with foreign ships in full employ; while British vessels covered the banks or filled the wet docks in a state of inactivity and decay.

Nor did their complaint stop here. The arbitrary system of impressing sea-apprentices, a system which acted with especial injury in the case of those of the watermen on the river who, being liable to be impressed in the fourth year of their apprenticeship, were lost to their masters when their services were becoming remunerative, was severely and justly criticised; indeed it is on record that, before this period, there had been no fewer than thirty thousand watermen, etc., at work on the river Thames, between Westminster-bridge and Gravesend, exclusive of the British and foreign seamen on board the shipping; but that in 1804 there was not a sixth part of that number. The new dock regulations and the employment of carts instead of lighters to carry goods to the merchants' inland warehouses swelled the general catalogue of grievances, while the erection of the East India Docks, then in progress, was looked on as the crowning act of mischief, and was therefore viewed by the forlorn shipowners with unmitigated horror.

Amid this numerous body of complainers, some of whose grievances were real, some insignificant, and others imaginary, there were happily men who had more enlarged views, and who were able to urge on the government to take effectual steps to extend the foreign trade, and to devote more attention than