Having thus, as they conceived, ample grounds for an appeal to Government, they, like the frogs before Jupiter, made an effort to induce Lord Derby, their great friend and patron, and then Prime Minister, to relieve their depressed fortunes.
Nor was this agitation for relief confined to the Shipowners’ Society of London. Aberdeen, Dundee, Newcastle, Shields, and various other ports on the north-east coast, where, perhaps, foreign competition was most severely felt, sent in petitions to Parliament; while numerous pamphlets appeared in which the ostensible cause of the Shipowners’ suffering was duly set forth. We had the old stories retold of the huge Yankee ships eating up all their profits in the Indian trade, told, too, at a time when American shipowners were suffering quite as much as themselves. Nor did the authors of these pamphlets fail to remind us of our old hobgoblins, the Swedes and Norwegians, who, faring sumptuously on “black-bread,” were carrying all before them in the Northern Seas and in the Mediterranean, to the irretrievable ruin of the hapless British shipowners.
Such tales of sorrow from the outports, including Liverpool, Glasgow, and those on the west coast of Scotland, where not a few of these “ruined” men had realised handsome fortunes during the Crimean War, made a deep impression on the bosom of the General Shipowners’ Society of London, whose hearts had been softened by their own “losses.”[178] They, too, as we have seen, entirely coincided with their brethren of the outports as to the cause of the depression: and, while it was resolved to continue pouring in the petitions to Parliament expressive of their views and praying for relief, and, also, to stir up an agitation through the medium of pamphlets and that portion of the press which entertained similar opinions to their own, it was likewise considered desirable to make a combined effort by the means of a public meeting to be held in London, so that their sufferings and their wrongs might become generally known among all classes of the community.
Meeting of Shipowners, December 15th, 1858.
Their proposal.
This meeting was consequently held at the London Tavern on the 15th December, 1858. The chairman, however, Mr. Duncan Dunbar, then one of the greatest individual shipowners in the kingdom, in opening the proceedings, declared that no idea was entertained of asking for a reversal of recent legislation, the delegates from the outports having previously come to the resolution to limit their demands to the consideration of the question of reciprocity, praying the Crown at the same time to put in motion the clauses of the Navigation Repeal Act, which authorize the Queen to retaliate on such foreign Powers as should refuse reciprocity, and to place the ships of these countries on, as nearly as possible, the same footing as that in which British ships are placed in the ports of such country.
Volumes of statistics were brought forward by Mr. George Frederick Young, who appeared as chief spokesman, and, as heretofore, the undaunted champion of his party, to show that, though British shipping had increased since the repeal of the Navigation Laws, foreign vessels frequenting our ports had done so in a far greater proportion. Mr. Young repudiated the idea—the “delusion”—that consumers were benefited by the reduction of freight to the full extent of the difference which must exist between the sum paid to the English carrier and the rate of freight paid to his foreign competitor; and concluded his remarks by a resolution to the effect that the existing “most deplorable and ruinous depression” had been partly caused, and was greatly aggravated by the unequal competition to which British shipping was exposed by the repeal of the Navigation Laws. Other speakers from Liverpool, Glasgow, Hull, Shields, Montrose, Dundee, and Aberdeen described the state of affairs in their several localities; and, finally, a petition to the Queen was agreed on, recapitulating the progress of legislation on the Navigation Laws, and alleging that the apprehensions entertained when that measure passed were fully verified by the result.
Similar meetings were held in various other parts of the country, including Tynemouth and North Shields, which I then represented, and a wish was intimated to me from those places that I should bring the state of the shipping interest under the notice of the House of Commons.
Although I entertained very different views to those expressed at these meetings, I felt, nevertheless, that our Shipowners had many just causes for complaint; and that, though it was now alike beyond the power of the Legislature to control the rising destinies of other and rival nations, or even confine their mercantile marine within the narrow 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.
Mr. Lindsay moves for a Committee of Inquiry.