. Mather addressed
a letter to the editor of the _Shipping Almanack and Gazette_, which
produced a great impression where the arguments of the Lancashire
leaders had been accepted as irrefutable. It is desirable to reproduce
this document, as the controversy was one of the most important in its
day, and the policy ultimately adopted remained longer open to question
than any other of the anti-protectionist measures which were adopted.
Mr. Mather's letter was the more effective, because it exposed an
artifice to which Mr. Gladstone especially resorted, but in which he was
supported by the Lancashire members:--

"The combined attack of Messrs. Gladstone, Bright, Cobden, and two
or three others in the House of Commons, upon the navigation laws, on
account of their preventing the importation of a few cargoes of cotton
lying at Havre, and demanding a suspension of these laws for the
immediate necessities of the manufactories, and the advantage of British
shipping, was as unfair and discreditable a proceeding as party men have
for a long time been guilty of. For the sixty-five thousand bales of
cotton at Havre, brought across the Atlantic chiefly by French ships, it
is, they assert, of advantage to British shipping to destroy that amount
of carriage on the long voyage, and allow this cotton to be brought from
France to England, which a few trips of a steamer would easily effect.
The very statement of the matter, in plain language, refutes the absurd
assertion. You are losing the carriage of thirty cargoes of cotton,
these gentlemen asserted. No, it is replied, for by preventing their
admission from France, as there is a great abundance of cotton in
America, we are gaining the carriage of thirty cargoes on the long
voyage--a portion in British ships; and you will get cotton just as
cheap, nay cheaper for the manufacturers, as the expense of transhipment
will be saved.

"But the cotton is immediately wanted, they assert. Now this was a mere
pretence, which the parties clearly understood, to give a momentary
effect to a most untenable charge. Events have corroborated this.

"Within a few days thirty-three vessels have brought seventy-three
thousand six hundred and forty-nine bales of cotton from America; and
such is the great want of it, sufficient to annihilate or suspend the
navigation laws, that the manufacturers only bought nineteen thousand
six hundred and sixty bales, while nine hundred and seventy bales were
bought for