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Rh sale a large stock already manufactured for the market. As the French led the way in exquisite designs and brought highly trained art and taste to their elaboration, their patterns ruled as well as created the fashions; and English ladies would give them the preference at any price to which heavy duties might raise them. The English manufacturers, who seemed to progress in improved production just in proportion to the pressure of this foreign competition, with the short-sightedness which protection engenders, petitioned Parliament in 1832 not only for customs regulations which smugglers could not, but insisted upon absolute prohibition of French goods, or the kind of goods they made themselves; not French brandy, wines, and that sort of thing which, of course, they would like to get as cheap as possible. They maintained before the committee of the House that nothing short of this policy "could produce any effect on the obstinate preference of English ladies for French ribbons, or save the producers of English goods from immediate ruin." It was a complemental or constituent opinion to this determined conclusion, "that steam could never be profitably applied to the manufacture of ribbons." But the hard-hearted Parliament would neither bar the ports against French goods nor impose heavier duties upon them. So, just for lack of the "protection" demanded, the manufacturers had to go