388 THE LONDON WEST INDIA INTEREST July On the 18th the general meeting met, Mr. Beeston Long being the chairman : a committee was appointed to prepare a petition to the house of commons ■ representing the alarming situation in which the West India islands are placed by the resolution of the congress, held at the city of Philadelphia in North America on the 5th of September 1774, and praying their interposition ' : the committee was to report to another general meeting to be held on the 25th inst. 1 This meeting was held and the petition agreed to ; it was determined that Mr. Alderman Oliver should be requested to present it and that the committee before appointed should prepare evidence in its support. A third general meeting was held on 31 January, and this is noteworthy because it resolved that the committee should meet from day to day, adjourn as they thought fit, arid call a general meeting when they considered it desirable. 2 On 6 February the power to summon a general meeting was exercised ; and a notice was inserted in the press that a general meeting was to take place the next day. The notice was signed by the members of the committee, eight in number ; 3 five of them (including the chairman) were among the gentlemen planters who signed the request to the merchants asking for a general meeting ; a sixth, George Walker, we know to have been a planter and the agent for Barbados, and of the remaining two neither was an attendant at the meetings of the merchants' society. If it be true that these eight members were the whole committee, the absence of merchants is noticeable, and lends some colour to a letter which appeared in the Gazetteer and Daily Advertiser of 1 7 January , violently condemning the merchants for their subservient relations with the planters. 4 It is, in any case, clear that it was far from being true at this time that the in- fluence of the planters was overshadowed by that of the merchants. No evidence has been found that the committee had anything but a temporary existence. When it again became necessary that general meetings should be held the matter proceeded very much on the same lines as before. In April 1778 two general meetings of planters and merchants took place, and at the second of these a committee of planters and merchants was appointed. On this occasion the chairman of the committee was Mr. Long, in whose house the committee met ; and several merchants were among the members. 5 by Mr. Samuel Vaughan to ' American Merchants, assembled Wednesday at the King's Arms Tavern '. 1 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, Thursday, February 16, 1775. 2 Ibid. 3 Daily Advertiser, Monday, 6 February 1775.
- Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, Tuesday, 17 January 1775. Letter signed
J. Massie, addressed ' To the Merchants trading to, or interested in, our North American Colonies '. 8 Merchants' Minutes, vol. i, meetings of 28 April 1778 and 29 April 1778.
