Accordingly I moved for a committee “to inquire into the operation of certain burdens specially affecting merchant shipping,” which after an interesting debate the House was pleased to grant.
But the committee had scarcely assembled when Parliament was dissolved, and it was not until a new Parliament had met, that the subject was again brought under the notice of the House of Commons. In the meantime the Shipowners’ Society of London had urged Government, in a letter of the 22nd February, 1859, for a reply to their petition praying the Queen to exercise the powers vested in her, and to put in force the retaliatory clause of the Repeal Act of 1849.
Well-drawn petition of the Shipowners.
This petition, I must state, was short and exceedingly well drawn. It gracefully avoided all matters of detail and controversy; the petitioners approached her Majesty, “animated by the most profound sentiments of loyalty,” for which, indeed, I must add the Shipowners of the United Kingdom have ever been conspicuous; they represented “the ruinous state of depression” into which their interest was “plunged,” and they “implored” her Majesty “to be pleased to extend to that important national interest such assistance and relief as her Majesty was enabled to afford to it through the exercise of those powers which were vested by law in the Crown.”[179]
The petition was signed by the chairman, Mr. Dunbar, as representative of the meeting; by Mr. George Marshall, as chairman of the General Shipowners’ Society; and by deputies from most of the leading seaports of the kingdom. From the weight and high character of the persons who had signed this petition, Government could not do otherwise than attach considerable importance to it, however much they may have differed from the mode of relief the memorialists prayed Her Majesty to adopt. Indeed, the time had arrived when it was desirable for Government to review the effects really produced by the repeal of the Navigation Laws, and to inquire into the burdens and restrictions to which British Shipowners were still subjected. Nor was it less necessary to direct attention to the state of foreign legislation with regard to British shipping, since the removal by us of all restrictions on the vessels of foreign nations engaged in the trade of the United Kingdom and her possessions. As the exposition of the bearing of these questions, necessarily, furnishes a complete insight into the Merchant Shipping of the country at that period, it is my duty to furnish the report of Government, if not in detail, at least at greater length than I might otherwise have done.
Foreign Governments and the amount of their reciprocity.
In this carefully considered document, it was, authoritatively, announced that France, Spain, and Portugal, where partial restrictions on the ships of other nations were still maintained, were the only foreign Governments which had not extended complete reciprocity to British ships so far as regards the foreign oversea carrying trade.
French trade.
In France, under the treaty of 1826, British and French ships were on a footing of equality in the direct trade between the two countries; but, in the indirect foreign trade, in the colonial, and in the coasting trades of that country, British ships still laboured under serious disabilities.
Spanish trade.