Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/409



The commercial crisis, however, which occurred on both sides of the Atlantic, at the close of 1857, necessarily operated injuriously upon the progress of English trade, and consequently on English shipping. It must be also remembered that the Russian war, and, subsequently, the disturbances in British India, created a large and abnormal demand for tonnage, which ceased with the termination of those temporary causes; and, as tonnage employed exclusively in the Government transport service, does not appear in the preceding account, it is probable that, during 1858, there was a still greater check to the demand for tonnage than is therein expressed.

The temporary depression was, however, by no means confined to the shipping of the United Kingdom, as we have shown; similar symptoms had manifested themselves in other maritime countries.

Although the competition of British shipping in steam navigation had been the subject of loud complaint in America, it will be found that the decline in the building and employment of British shipping in 1858 was not so great in proportion as that which was indicated by the annual accounts of the imports

[*Footnote: Thus the Foreign Trade rose from 39,163,407l. in 1847, to 85,039,991l. in 1857, and the Colonial Trade from 13,686,038l. in 1847, to 37,115,257l. in 1857.]