are allowed to enter our ports (and our consumers invite them to do so), there was, in 1860, in our foreign trade, only 4,294,444 tons of foreign shipping with cargoes as against 5,760,537 tons of British shipping; whereas, in your foreign trade, in the same year, there was 2,348,261 tons of foreign shipping with cargoes as against 1,663,615 tons of your own.
It is, thus, evident that any restriction you impose on the freedom of intercourse with other countries, while it curtails the operations of your merchants, likewise enhances the price of the raw material to your manufacturers; and while it increases the cost of the commodity to your people, curtails the employment of your Shipowners. But, even if those restrictions and differential duties (which you still maintain without any advantage to the revenue) benefited your Shipowners, which they do not, why should your merchants and manufacturers, and landowners and farmers, and, above all, your hardworking people, be made to suffer, so that your Shipowners might be enriched? So long as all the producing classes were protected, the Shipowners might have had some right to say that, as they were obliged to pay, for the benefit, real or imaginary of others, enhanced prices for all articles of consumption, they were consequently entitled to some compensating protection; but, since the recent relaxations of the French tariff, and, now that the producing classes are exposed to the competition of other countries, these classes have unquestionably a right to insist on free navigation.
No doubt your Shipowners will consider, as ours did, that their class was entitled to claim peculiar privileges, because the merchant service is the legitimate nursery of the seamen for the navy necessary for the protection of the State; but we have 20,000 more seamen now in our merchant service than we had in 1849. Free intercourse with other countries gave increased employment to our shipping, and therefore we required more seamen. So it will be with your country when you adopt a similar policy.
But, however fallacious the arguments have proved which were used against the repeal of our Navigation Laws, it is hardly possible to conceive anything so pernicious and absurd as the law itself which you still maintain. By way of illustration, may I direct your attention to the line of steamers trading between Southampton and the various ports in India, viâ the Mediterranean? These vessels pass Marseilles every week laden
