Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/391

 was most severely felt, sent in petitions to Parliament; while numerous pamphlets appeared in which the ostensible cause of the Shipowners' suffering was duly set forth. We had the old stories retold of the huge Yankee ships eating up all their profits in the Indian trade, told, too, at a time when American shipowners were suffering quite as much as themselves. Nor did the authors of these pamphlets fail to remind us of our old hobgoblins, the Swedes and Norwegians, who, faring sumptuously on "black-bread," were carrying all before them in the Northern Seas and in the Mediterranean, to the irretrievable ruin of the hapless British shipowners.

Such tales of sorrow from the outports, including Liverpool, Glasgow, and those on the west coast of Scotland, where not a few of these "ruined" men had realised handsome fortunes during the Crimean War, made a deep impression on the bosom of the General Shipowners' Society of London, whose hearts had been softened by their own "losses." They, too,