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."[1] They, too,
- ↑ When I was a member of the House of Commons, there was a great brewer, a most excellent man, who sat close to me on the cross benches, who frequently complained of the heavy "losses" he sustained in his trade. I was under the impression that the brewing trade was a very lucrative one, especially to persons like himself, who conducted it on a gigantic scale, and I was puzzled to understand how, in the face of such "losses," he could continue adding vat to vat, and rearing fresh mountains of beer-barrels every year to his brewery yard. Turning one night to a mutual friend who knew him more intimately than I did, I asked, in the simplicity of my heart, if it really was the case that the great establishment of which our friend was the senior was a losing concern. "It is so," he answered, "according to our friend's way of calculating; for every pound less than 75,000l. per annum, which is estimated as his share of the net profits, is booked as loss!" Such must also have been the way in which some of our large shipowners calculated their "losses" after the repeal of the Navigation Laws.
