entertained of the paramount importance of maintaining the pre-eminence of our navy, and from the belief that the commercial marine was a nursery for the royal fleets, with which they could not dispense.  But latterly the laws had become unpopular even with some of those who had formerly been supposed to derive the greatest benefit from them.  Many of our colonies had complained of their operation, and several of the ablest of our colonial governors had recommended their repeal.  They had been found, too, to present frequent and considerable difficulties in our commercial negotiations with other countries, and many naval officers of large experience and sound judgment expressed a decided belief that they were of no practical use to the naval service.  The result of a long and able debate was that the laws were repealed, with the exception of that portion of them which preserved the monopoly of the coasting trade to our own seamen and vessels, that exception being chiefly dictated by considerations connected with the prevention of smuggling.

The ground on which the ministers relied in proposing this repeal of laws so ancient was that, when protection had been removed from every other trade, those concerned in these different trades had an irresistible claim for its removal from the shipping.  And on general principles, both of commerce and statesmanship, the claim was, as they urged, irresistible, unless some object of greater importance still than uniformity of legislation—­namely, the national safety, bound up as it unquestionably was in the perpetual pre-eminence of the national navy—­required an exception to be made.  But for the maintenance of our maritime supremacy it was, as Burke had preached three-quarters of a century before, better to trust to the spirit of the people, to their attachment to their government, and to their innate aptitude for seamanship, which they seem to have inherited from the hardy rovers of the dark ages, and which no other nation shares with them in an equal degree.  And if that may safely be trusted, as undoubtedly it may, to maintain the supremacy of our warlike fleets, the preponderance of argument seemed greatly on the side of those who contended that our commercial fleets needed no such protection; to which it may be added that exceptions to a general rule and principle are in themselves so questionable, that the burden of proof seems to lie upon those who would establish or maintain them.  But the advocates of free-trade were not content even with this triumph, though it might have been thought a crowning one, and in the course of the next year they succeeded in carrying a resolution which (though Lord Derby and the opponents of the act of 1846 were now in office) was not resisted even by the ministry, being, in fact, the result of a compromise between the different parties; and which asserted that “the improved condition of the country, and especially of the industrious classes, was mainly the result of recent legislation, which