Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/172

 *pealed, it would be seen that the interests of the merchants would be quite as much compromised as those of shipowners, as it was under the operation of these laws that importations were so largely directed into the emporium of England. He apprehended that this repeal would substitute certain conveniently-located foreign ports as depôts for imported produce for the supply of England, in lieu of British ports. He fortified this opinion by elaborate calculations, showing an enormous difference in the warehousing charges at Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Hamburg, leading, as he apprehended, to this inevitable conclusion, that a British merchant would find it more to his interest to establish depôts at those places, than to import commodities for the supply of his own country, to be lodged in the St. Katherine or West India Docks, or in other similar establishments.

With regard to the subject of the Whale Fisheries, and the way in which they might be affected by a repeal of the Navigation Laws, Mr. Young pointed out that the trade of the northern and southern fisheries had been for many years past a declining one: but this decline, he said, though in a great degree traceable to other causes, received an accelerated impetus from the course pursued by the Legislature in discouraging these trades, while the Americans, on the other hand, had received from their Legislature every possible support. So far as regards the relative cost of navigating British ships, Mr. Young brought forward a mass of figures for the*