hides brought from Marseilles to Rotterdam, not finding a market there, were taken back to Marseilles; and when sent thence to Liverpool, were seized as imported in a French bottom, and released only on the condition that they should be sent back to New York! Such interruptions of commerce, Mr. Ricardo rightly contended, were alike inconvenient and wasteful. He next pointed out discrepancies in the working of the Act, with the various Orders in Council made under it, asserting, at the same time, that freights were artificially enhanced by protection. He espoused, too, the cause of the colonists, who now demanded as a matter of justice, that trade should be as free in shipping as it was in sugar. Could, Mr. Ricardo demanded, any ground of political expediency or any national advantage be shown to justify the retention of these laws? He admitted that the authority of Adam Smith would be adduced against
- [Footnote: by a custom-house officer, who would tell him that he could not be
permitted to land his cargo. "Why?" the Spaniard would inquire. "I understood you wanted wine." "So we do," the officer would reply. Then the Spaniard would say, "I will exchange my wine for your earthenware." "That will not do," replies the officer. "It must be brought by Frenchmen on a French ship." "But the French do not want your earthenware"[1]. "We cannot help that;" we must not let you violate our Navigation Laws"[2].]
- ↑ They did very much; for Mr. Garratt, the partner of Alderman Copeland, said at the time to a friend of mine, that he would ruin every earthenware potter in France if they would allow British earthenware to be admitted free of duty.
- ↑ The Spaniard was no doubt under a misapprehension. The French wines could not have been brought into our ports in a Spanish ship; wine being an enumerated article which was excluded, "except in British ships, or ships of the country of which the goods are the produce." (8 & 9 Vict., cap. 88, s. 2.)
