Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/415

 *dressed to the constituencies of the United Kingdom at the general election in the spring of 1859.

The returns in question consisted of five statements, including the period from 1834 to 1858. They are too voluminous to be given here, but it was clear from them that, if the increase of the entrances and clearances of British ships at the ports of the United Kingdom, since the repeal of the Navigation Laws, had been 3,221,767, the increase of foreign ships on the other hand amounted to 5,083,826 tons. To these leading facts, the Shipowners' Association, triumphantly, referred the different constituencies, and, although British ships in the eight years over which these returns extended, had increased to a far greater extent than they had in any similar previous period, the Association pointed to the still greater increase of foreign shipping, and implored the electors of the leading maritime ports to send such representatives to the new Parliament, who would be exponents of the opinions they sought to perpetuate; and who would save British Shipowners from the certain ruin in their opinion awaiting them, as was so clearly demonstrated by the "appalling" number of foreign ships frequenting our ports. Pertinaciously adhering in this celebrated manifesto to their extreme Protectionist principles, they now reasserted with confidence, and with a brazen front the more astonishing, after what they had previously admitted, every doctrine that had proved to be fallacious, every "fact" which had long since been shown to have had its origin in the regions of