Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/394

 limits prescribed by our jealousy, so as to remove all dread of foreign competition, there were yet many burdens from which they ought to be relieved, and many restrictions, to which they would never have been subjected by the State, had it not been considered that they derived peculiar benefits from the laws so long enforced for their supposed advantage.

Accordingly I moved for a committee "to inquire into the operation of certain burdens specially affecting merchant shipping," which after an interesting debate the House was pleased to grant.

But the committee had scarcely assembled when Parliament was dissolved, and it was not, until a new Parliament had met, that the subject was again brought under the notice of the House of Commons. In the meantime the Shipowners' Society of London had urged Government, in a letter of the 22nd February, 1859, for a reply to their petition praying the Queen to exercise the powers vested in her, and to put in force the retaliatory clause of the Repeal Act of 1849.

This petition, I must state, was short and exceedingly well drawn. It gracefully avoided all matters of detail and controversy; the petitioners approached her Majesty, "animated by the most profound sentiments of loyalty," for which, indeed, I must add the Shipowners of the United Kingdom have ever been conspicuous; they represented "the ruinous state of depression" into which their interest was "plunged," and they "implored" her Majesty "to be pleased to extend to that important national interest such assistance and relief as her Majesty was enabled to afford