goods to France, and imported French manufactured goods into England, but no injury accrued to any branch of our manufactures from the rates of duty which he had specified-all of which, by the bye, were inferior to those he now called upon the committee to ratify. He would here seize the opportunity of stating one or two facts as an illustration of the improvement which grew out of this interchange of the manufactures of the two countries. Immediately after the treaty of 1786, French woollens were imported into this country in great abundance. They became very fashionable, and nobody who called himself a gentleman would wear any thing else but a French coat. In less than two years, our manufacturers had so much improved in the manufacture of woollen, that their cloths were frequently sold as French, and no difference could be discerned between them. same improvement' took place in the manufacture of fancy muslins, in which they had before excelled us in the beauty of their patterns. He had no doubt but a similar improvement would take place at present in our manufactures under the competition against which they would now have to contend. From Switzerland, and certain parts of Germany, some articles of cotton goods might perhaps be brought which would have a superior brightness of colour to recommend them to public attention; but he really believed that the great bulk of our consumption would still be supplied, in spite of all foreign competitors, by the skill and industry of our own manufacturers. He was the more inclined to believe this, from a recollection of

The

the improvement which had taken place in the silk trade since the alterations made in it by the act of last session had come into full play. Up to the last year we had made no advances in the branch of our manufactures; but at present he knew of his own personal knowledge that British silks were sent down to the coast of Sussex, and were sold there as silks of French manufacture. Such was the empire of fashion; it led its votaries to give extravagant prices for goods, not caring so much for the value of the article manufactured as for the name of the place from which it was supposed to come. He might be told that a great change had been effected in the country since the year 1786-that we had been engaged in a long and expensive war, and that we had to support the weight of a great many new and heavy taxes. He admitted that such was the case. In other countries, however, war had raged in all its horrors: their taxes had been increased, and their burdens made to press more heavily. What was still more mischievous, their capital had been ravaged, diminished, and destroyed: in this country no such calamity had been experienced. The capital of England, thank God, was stil unimpaired; and it was not with us so much a question of mere manual labour, as it was, since the invention of the steam-engine, a question of the progress of the reflective mind of man calling forth the capacity of the country to give effect to its wonderful discoveries. In that respect we stood proudly pre-eminent. In addition to our capital, we were in possession of that energy of enterprise, and of that stability of exertion, which had

always

always been the distinguishing marks of the English character; and he had no doubt, that with such qualifications on our side, we should, even though all our protecting duties were abolished, continue superior to the efforts of our commercial rivals, not only in our own market, but also in the markets of every nation to which our fleets could waft us. He expected to meet with another objection-indeed, he had already met with it in the correspondence he had felt it right to carry on with some intelligent merchants on this very subject-he expected, he said, to be told that in 1786, we had insured from France, by treaty, a reciprocity of commercial advantages, and that at present we had made no such arrangement. He would allow that this argument might in one respect be worth considering-he meant in its relation to the foreign market; but with regard to the danger of our being undersold in our own markets, he did not conceive it to hold at all. He had just now told them that he had considered it his duty, before he proposed these resolutions, to commence a correspondence regarding them with some of our most enterprising and intelligent merchants. From one of them, who had formerly been a member of that house, and whose absence from it he regretted, not only on account of the vigour of mind which he displayed upon all questions, but more especially on account of the great practical knowledge which he would have brought with him to this question-from Mr. Kirkman Finlay he had received a letter, in answer to a communication he had made to him, of which he

66

should beg leave to read a part to the house. The part which he should read related to this question of reciprocity. The letter was dated the 18th of February, and was in the following terms :— Subscribing, as I do, to every one of the advantages stated in your letter, I will not occupy your time by going farther into the subject; at the same time, I must not lead you to suppose that such a measure is likely to be adopted without some opposition from manufacturers, who have all their old prejudices to remove before they can subscribe, in their own case, to the sound principles of free commercial intercourse, which you are, so much to the public advantage, endeavouring to establish. Believe me, that no one takes a deeper interest than I do in the success of all such measures; and I am certain that the adoption of such a plan as we are now talking of, will go far, in its consequences, to satisfy persons both at home and abroad, of the benefits that will arise to all countries from the general establishment of such measures. It is no doubt true, that it will be argued that such concessions ought not to be granted to foreign states, without being accompanied by some stipulation for the admission into their consumption of some of our produce or manufactures on the payment of a moderate duty. But in my view of the case, we ought not so suffer ourselves to be influenced by such reasoning, since our whole object being to benefit ourselves, our inquiry is naturally confined to the consideration of whether such a mode of acting be really advantageous, independent altogether of what

may

may be done by the government of other countries. Now, if the measure be really beneficial to us, why shall we withhold from ourselves an advantage, because other states are not yet advanced so far as we are in the knowledge of their own interests, or have not attained the power of carrying their own views into practice?" The hon. member, after he had finished the perusal of the above let ter, observed, that in the last words of it his hon. friend had clearly stated the real grounds upon which foreign states had acted-namely, their ignorance of their own interests, and their incompetency to carry their own views into practice. But let his hon. friend, the chancellor of the exchequer, continue to come down to parliament, year after year, to accumulate fresh proofs of the advantage of taking away restrictive impositions upon commerce, of the benefit of diminishing excessive duties, and of the practicability of obtaining from such a diminution of duties an increased revenue-let his hon. friend, he said, continue to come down year after year (and long might he live to do so), to propose a reduction of taxes, and to gratify the country by an exhibition of resources which, notwithstanding such reduction, still raised the exchequer to the same level-let his honourable friend continue to present such an exhilarating spectacle to the sight of the world, and it would not be long before he would open the eyes of other governments to the advantages of our present system. At present they did not give us credit for sincerity, but suspected that for some reason or other, into which

they could not penetrate, we held it out to them as a deceitful lure. They would not adopt our new course of relaxation, but were rather inclined to adopt our cast-off resolutions in favour of restrictions and monopolies, and to take up the task of enforcing them in our stead. But when they saw the advantages we derived from abandoning our unwise and antiquated prejudices in favour of restrictions and prohibitions, when they became convinced by the testimony of their senses that every step of our progress was attended by fresh benefits, it needed no stretch of prophetic imagination to predict that they would soon renounce the errors of their ways, follow our example, and pare down the most excessive of their duties, as he was now calling upon the committee to pare down the excessive duties which had been imposed by former parliaments. Having thus stated the alterations which he intended to propose with regard to the protecting or prohibitory duties, it was necessary that he should now add, that with a view to give the British manufacturer every fair advantage, and to enable him to meet the competition with which he would have to contend in the foreign market, it was desirable to consider how far it was possible to reduce some of the duties which at present seemed to interfere with their immediate success, by being imposed on the raw material which he was obliged to use in his manufactures. During the exigency of the war, contrary to the policy which the country had pursued before its commencement, we found it necessary to lay a duty-or at least we did lay a duty-on various

articles

on this oil altogether, and to give the manufacturer the power of supplying the farmer with cake, instead of compelling him to get it when he could afford it, from the foreign market. He believed that it would also be an encouragement to the manufacture of low-priced woollens to reduce the duty on a species of foreign wool used for coarse cloths still lower than it was reduced already. Our manufacturers were in the habit of importing a great quantity of lowpriced wool at a shilling a pound, or thereabouts. It was in that branch of our manufacture that they most of all feared competition. He therefore proposed, with a view to encourage them against despondency, that the duty on all foreign wool imported into this country, which was under the price of one shilling a pound, should be reduced to a half-penny a pound. He was instructed that to the manufacturer of coarse woollens, this reduction would prove no small source of relief. In making this proposition, he might appear to be travelling, and indeed he was travelling out of his own proper department, and to be trespassing on the peculiar province of his right hon. friend the chancellor of the exchequer; but as the duties to which he was referring were not considerable, and as the amount of revenue derived from them was not great, he trusted that his right hon. friend would forgive him the interference of which he was guilty. Though he was labouring in the vineyard of which his right hon. friend was the conductor and overseer, he was doing nothing more than hewing down the rotten branches, which afforded to it neither ornament nor

protection. If any benefit accrued from his exertions, he trusted that his right hon. friend would reap the fruits of it, and would offer them next year to the country in the further relief of taxation. He now came to the last of the three heads into which he had divided this subject; and under that head he intended to propose the measures which, in his opinion, would tend to relieve the commerce and navigation of the country; and he must beg the particular attention of the committee, whilst he suggested a measure for the relief of an interest so important to the country as its shipping interests and its commercial relations at home and abroad. There was already laid on the table one bill which would contribute very essentially to that relief. That bill was intended to do away with all the quarantine duties. The amount of those duties was considerable. He thought that they were unfairly placed on the shipping interest, though the alleged reason for placing them there was the protection of the country. It was a hardship that the shipping interest should be exposed to these duties, independently of the loss of time and the heavy expense which the keeping of quarantine inflicted upon it. On that account he was of opinion that the committee on foreign trade had acted with no less prudence than propriety in advising that the expense of these duties should be borne by the country at large, and not by any particular class in it. This measure would, beyond all question, be a relief to the commerce of the country in general, but would be more especially a relief to that part of it which was engaged in trading