Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/416

 fancy or fiction, every appeal to be saved from ruin as baseless as the shepherd's wolf cry, and every theory as visionary as their own fears; by such means, hoping to revive a system, which the Legislature and every class of the community, except themselves, had pronounced to be neither wise, just, nor beneficial. But, with these principles patent to the whole world, fully confirmed, too, as they were, by the extraordinary success resulting from the repeal of the Navigation Laws, they kept harping on the one string, that foreign shipping entering and clearing from our ports had, since that period, increased in a greater ratio than our own, and this one fact produced to a large extent the desired effect on the maritime portions of the constituencies.

It was vain to tell them that, under the new policy, we had increased our shipping to an extent far beyond what had been hitherto accomplished; or that the nation at large, by obtaining all it required from foreign nations at materially reduced rates, was greatly and proportionately benefited by the change. Nor was it of any use to show that our exports and imports, and, consequently, the general wealth of the country, had already increased far beyond the most sanguine hopes of even the Free-*traders. To attempt to prove to a maritime constituency that the more intercourse we had with other countries the better it would be for us, and that the impoverishment of our neighbours by restrictive laws was not the best means of enriching ourselves, was then a mere waste of time, and all such arguments were, at too many of our seaports, only received