Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/252

 liberty to go where they would, and come from where it suited them, than to start them from our ports encumbered with the 8 & 9 Vict. cap. 88, and ballasted with twelve volumes of Hertslet's 'Commercial Treaties.'" The resolution was agreed to without a trial of strength, and the Bill was brought in. It contained twenty-three clauses.

Upon the 2nd March, the second reading of the Bill having been fixed for the 9th March, the General Shipowners' Society held their annual meeting at the London Tavern. Their accustomed comments upon lights, harbours, and pilotage; discriminating duties in foreign ports; the East Indian salt monopoly; the Merchant Seamen's Act; the Passengers' Act; the Merchant Seamen's Fund, and a variety of other points, which, at ordinary times, usually occupied a large share of their attention and space in their report—were on this occasion all subordinate to the one question of all-absorbing consequence, the threatened impending repeal of the Navigation Laws. To discuss special regulations affecting maritime commerce, while the whole question of general policy trembled in the balance, was both inconvenient and embarrassing.

The committee narrated at great length the various steps taken by Government since 1846 with regard to the Navigation Laws. In reviewing the evidence taken before both Houses, the shipowners made it appear that they were completely triumphant in establishing all the various points on which they took their ground; viz., that no evil susceptible of any