Condemnation of Mr. Porter’s statistics.
In speaking of the tables from the Board of Trade and Customs, he said a lively impression prevailed on all sides, that they could prove anything and everything. Indeed, it had been remarked, give me half an hour, and the run of the multiplication table, and I’ll engage to pay off the National Debt. In statistics it is easy to add a little here, and subtract a little there, quietly to slip in a figure—it may be a cypher among your data—slyly to make what seems a reasonable postulate in your premises, but which turns out to be a begging of the question; and, behold, you gain your point and triumph; until, it is found that your adversary, having access to the same stores of arithmetic, proves his case, and refutes yours, with the same facility. Such are statistics when severed from sound principle and plain reasoning. But how little are these to be relied on when prepared by those in the employ of one party? To trust oneself among such details would be perilous in the extreme. “My noble friend has fared forth into the labyrinth with such bad success, that his fate seems to warn me how I venture to follow his perilous course. But there remains to deter me, like a beacon on the same coast, the sad wreck of another adventurer, the good ship Board of Trade, G. R. Porter, Master, cast away on the shoals of these faithless waters.” The noble Lord then assailed Mr. Porter with the whole force of his sarcasm. He said: “Mr. Porter, showing the comparative progress of English and American tonnage, takes the whole of one part and only part of the other, and thus makes out the result which suits his argument. Lord Hardwicke, the chairman, put this question to the witness, after stating the entire difference of the two returns, the difference being total in one case and partial in the other. ‘Then, consequently, these returns are not to be taken compared together, as showing in any degree the comparative value of British and American tonnage?’ Mark the answer of the hapless Mr. Porter. ‘Certainly not.’” The noble Lord then went on tearing, in the opinion of the opponents of the Bill, Mr. Porter’s evidence to shreds. “I am reminded,” said his Lordship, “of the cooking of the returns. But here we had called up the chief cook to examine him. We asked, ‘Is this dish pure?’ ‘Not at all,’ he answered. ‘Is it nutritive?’ ‘Nothing of the kind.’ ‘Is it safe and wholesome to eat?’ ‘Certainly not?’ ‘Have you any means of correcting its poison by an antidote?’ ‘I am not sure; I rather think I have; but I am not certain.’” The noble Lord then referred to the reciprocity treaties; the fact being that these treaties were all respecting differential duties; all of them were grounded on the comparatively sound principle of only relaxing our monopoly in favour of those States who agreed to give us the quid pro quo; whereas the present scheme was to give the quid without the quo; to sweep away all restriction at once with every country before we secured an equivalent from any one; and so far from proportioning our sacrifice to our gain, to sacrifice everything before we gained anything.
Protected and unprotected trade.
“On the statistics of the protected and unprotected trades,” continued his Lordship, “it is, that the greatest errors have been committed. It was among these shoals that Mr. Porter had left a wreck, as a beacon to warn us how we follow his course. He, no doubt, had steered to the best of his ability, and quite unconsciously had been cast away; but, that he acted under the bias of a strong prejudice in favour of his ally and relative, the author of the present Bill, is very much to be suspected, for we all know that the Bill is really Mr. Ricardo’s, who, in 1847, moved the Committee on the Navigation Laws, the Government being afterwards pushed on by their supporters, impatient at seeing them hold their places and do nothing.” After dissecting these tables with a ruthless hand, Lord Brougham asked how any rational man could place reliance upon tables thus framed, and thus abounding on their face with errors the most fatal. Their great concoctor is asked about these errors, and he cannot deny them, so he says the heading of the return is wrong, and that instead of “unprotected,” it should have been “less protected.” Indeed! But that is just giving up the whole value of the table, and making it utterly useless—utterly unfit to be the ground of any inference whatever—utterly foreign to the present question. For, observe, we can understand what is meant by a trade unprotected by the Navigation Laws, and compare it with one that is protected; but a trade “less protected,” how is that to be defined? Less protected than what? What does this tell us? What makes more, what less? How can we compare them together? All depends upon how much more and how much less, and this Mr. Porter does not affect to show.
Voyages to the continent.
“But,” exclaimed his Lordship, “this is not the worst of it by a great deal!” He then sifted the whole returns about the voyages to the continent, to which I have already referred. “My Lords, I will readily give a large licence for exaggeration to that lively class of persons who contribute to our amusement by their powers of imagination, drawing upon their fancy for their facts, and on their memory for their jests. To these men I render all grateful homage, as among the gayest of our sad species; so far as fourfold, or even tenfold, I am willing to extend my licence. But what shall we say of a hundredfold, nay, a hundred-and-fiftyfold, and that, not by the lively wit, but by the plodding dealer in returns, tables, and trade and shipping statistics. I must really send them away to bury themselves and their errors in the recesses of the trade department, and no longer hope to obtain any faith here. I have done with such food, such dry food even when it is honestly prepared and fairly served up.”
Lord Brougham then entered fully into the merits of the general question, calling upon their Lordships not to part rashly with what had been called the miserable remnants, the fragments of a worn-out system. “Fragments, indeed! They are of gigantic size; they are the splendid remains of a mighty system; they are the pillars of our navy; the props of our maritime defence.” He showed that there remained the almost entire monopoly of our home trade, and the perfectly rigorous monopoly of our colonial trade, employing above a million and a half of shipping, and 20,000 seamen, with a capital that gave export and import to between fifteen and sixteen millions sterling in the year. He further insisted that the restrictions affecting Canada could be easily removed without unsettling our whole policy.
The policy of the Navigation Laws rested, in his opinion, on the position that, without such a partial monopoly as they gave to British shipping, we never could maintain a sufficiently ample nursery for our navy, an object of primary importance to every insular empire, and, therefore, to be sought at a considerable sacrifice of the wealth unfettered commerce might more rapidly accumulate.
Napoleon’s desire for ships, colonies, and commerce.
The Emperor Napoleon I. has been cited as having wished “for ships, colonies, and commerce.” The quotation is not quite accurate.[123] He inveighed against “the ships, colonies, and commerce of England,” and mentioned these as the object of his hostility; whence Mr. Pitt, at a Guildhall festival, gave as a retaliatory toast, “the ships, colonies, and commerce of England,” a retort which derived its point from the French Emperor’s hostility against these special objects. Lord Brougham, in his splendid declamatory style, showed how Napoleon must have wished in vain—for we had swept the seas of his navy, captured all his colours—because we had created our own marine, which, he argued, owed its existence entirely to the encouragement the Navigation Laws gave to ship-building, and the facilities lent by the same laws to the manning our fleets, which that encouragement had created. For nearly two hundred years, he continued, we had abided by that policy; and holding steadily our course, neither swerving to the right nor to the left, never abandoning it, only adapting it to varying events which have altered the distribution of dominion in other regions, we have upheld the system which has made our navy the envy of our rivals, the terror of our enemies, and the admiration of the world. “Are you,” exclaimed his Lordship, with one of those bursts of ready eloquence for which he was so conspicuous in debate, “prepared to abandon a system to which you owe so precious a possession, not only the foundation of your glory, the bulwark of your strength, but the protection of your very existence as a nation?”