Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/297

 said his Lordship, "of the cooking of the returns. But here we had called up the chief cook to examine him. We asked, 'Is this dish pure?' 'Not at all,' he answered. 'Is it nutritive?' 'Nothing of the kind.' 'Is it safe and wholesome to eat?' 'Certainly not?' 'Have you any means of correcting its poison by an antidote?' 'I am not sure; I rather think I have; but I am not certain.'" The noble Lord then referred to the reciprocity treaties; the fact being that these treaties were all respecting differential duties; all of them were grounded on the comparatively sound principle of only relaxing our monopoly in favour of those States who agreed to give us the quid pro quo; whereas the present scheme was to give the quid without the quo; to sweep away all restriction at once with every country before we secured an equivalent from any one; and so far from proportioning our sacrifice to our gain, to sacrifice everything before we gained anything.

"On the statistics of the protected and unprotected trades," continued his Lordship, "it is, that the greatest errors have been committed. It was among these shoals that Mr. Porter had left a wreck, as a beacon to warn us how we follow his course. He, no doubt, had steered to the best of his ability, and quite unconsciously had been cast away; but, that he acted under the bias of a strong prejudice in favour of his ally and relative, the author of the present Bill, is very much to be suspected, for we all know that the Bill is really Mr. Ricardo's, who, in 1847, moved the Committee on the Navigation Laws, the Government being