Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/390

 previously drained by the insolvency of various mushroom speculators in ships, failed for 5,000,000l., and the Wolverhampton Bank followed for 1,000,000l. Many private mercantile firms, also, whose liabilities alone were variously computed at a sum not far short of 20,000,000l., were, at the same period, obliged to suspend payment.

Through such overwhelming disasters, it was hardly to be expected that the Shipowners of Great Britain would pass unscathed, especially after the prosperity they had enjoyed during the Crimean War. Nevertheless, the General Shipowners' Society of London, in the report of the annual meeting, held on the 25th June, 1858, does not appear to have attributed the cause of the depression under which Shipowners were suffering to the revulsion in commercial affairs. On the contrary, they still held the strange delusion, that, so far as they were concerned, the repeal of our Navigation Laws, together with the absence of reciprocity on the part of foreign nations, were the main causes of suffering: curiously enough, too, the report attributed some portion of their misfortunes to the Merchant Shipping Act of 1854, and the Passenger Act of the following year.

Having thus, as they conceived, ample grounds for an appeal to Government, they, like the frogs before Jupiter, made an effort to induce Lord Derby, their great friend and patron, and then Prime Minister, to relieve their depressed fortunes.

Nor was this agitation for relief confined to the Shipowners' Society of London. Aberdeen, Dundee, Newcastle, Shields, and various other ports on the north-east coast, where, perhaps, foreign competition