Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/393

 Laws, foreign vessels frequenting our ports had done so in a far greater proportion. Mr. Young repudiated the idea—the "delusion"—that consumers were benefited by the reduction of freight to the full extent of the difference which must exist between the sum paid to the English carrier and the rate of freight paid to his foreign competitor; and concluded his remarks by a resolution to the effect that the existing "most deplorable and ruinous depression" had been partly caused, and was greatly aggravated by the unequal competition to which British shipping was exposed by the repeal of the Navigation Laws. Other speakers from Liverpool, Glasgow, Hull, Shields, Montrose, Dundee, and Aberdeen described the state of affairs in their several localities; and, finally, a petition to the Queen was agreed on, recapitulating the progress of legislation on the Navigation Laws, and alleging that the apprehensions entertained when that measure passed were fully verified by the result.

Similar meetings were held in various other parts of the country, including Tynemouth and North Shields, which I then represented, and a wish was intimated to me from those places that I should bring the state of the shipping interest under the notice of the House of Commons.

Although I entertained very different views to those expressed at these meetings, I felt, nevertheless, that our Shipowners had many just causes for complaint; and that, though it was now alike beyond the power of the Legislature to control the rising destinies of other and rival nations, or even confine their mercantile marine within the narrow