Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/298

 afterwards pushed on by their supporters, impatient at seeing them hold their places and do nothing." After dissecting these tables with a ruthless hand, Lord Brougham asked how any rational man could place reliance upon tables thus framed, and thus abounding on their face with errors the most fatal. Their great concoctor is asked about these errors, and he cannot deny them, so he says the heading of the return is wrong, and that instead of "unprotected," it should have been "less protected." Indeed! But that is just giving up the whole value of the table, and making it utterly useless—utterly unfit to be the ground of any inference whatever—utterly foreign to the present question. For, observe, we can understand what is meant by a trade unprotected by the Navigation Laws, and compare it with one that is protected; but a trade "less protected," how is that to be defined? Less protected than what? What does this tell us? What makes more, what less? How can we compare them together? All depends upon how much more and how much less, and this Mr. Porter does not affect to show.

"But," exclaimed his Lordship, "this is not the worst of it by a great deal!" He then sifted the whole returns about the voyages to the continent, to which I have already referred. "My Lords, I will readily give a large licence for exaggeration to that lively class of persons who contribute to our amusement by their powers of imagination, drawing upon their fancy for their facts, and on their memory for their jests. To these men I render all grateful homage, as among the gayest of our sad species; so far as four