to foreign countries. This would indeed be ruinous; but we have shewn that their interference has yet had no such effectwhat it may have will probably depend on themselves: let their ships be built with proper care, and increased employment will be found for this valuable class of men; nor would the builders themselves suffer by a judicious application of this additional labour, as the value of their ships would be greatly enhanced: let them also be contented with prices less than those of which the extravagance is said to have driven the East India Company and the merchants of London to build ships at the out-ports of the kingdom.

After all, this dreaded emigration of shipwrights is a bugbear. It appears from the Report of the Committee on the Apprentice Laws,' presented to the House of Commons the 5th of May, 1813, that a great number of the artificers employed in the Thames' yards are not shipwrights, or such as have served an apprenticeship to that trade. The modern builder, it seems, prefers whether taking men who can handle an axe, an adze, or an augre, millwright, wheelwright, house-carpenter, or joiner, on the pressure of the moment, to bringing up regular apprentices to the trade; so that there may be some truth in the assertion of the builders that there are not now one-half the apprentices which there used to be formerly. These auxiliary workmen being the least useful, will, of course, be the first discharged; but it will not by any means follow that such discharge will occasion the emigration of either description: the real shipwright will have more employ and encouragement, and the discharged artificers will revert to those branches of carpentry in which they were originally brought up. And to what country, we would ask the Thames builders, will they emigrate? Not to America, for there they have more shipwrights than can find employment; [not to France, because there they have already twice the number of ships they can man.

On the whole, we are confident that a recurrence to the old system would afford far greater relief and encouragement to the real shipwright than any arbitrary exclusion of a few black ships' from those rights to which they are unquestionably entitled. It is satisfactory however to learn, from the document we allude to, that in times of emergency the aid of various descriptions of carpenters can at once be brought into action with effect, and that every man who can handle a tool may be employed under the superintendance of those more immediately acquainted with ship-building. This is not the case in India; ages would there be required to restore a ruined establishment.

The next Resolution objects to the India-built ships on the ground of their being exempt from contributions to the revenue to which British-built ships are subject. This is surely a gratuitous

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assertion. The timber and petty stores used in ship-building are subject to customs or duties in India in addition to those to which the builders in this country are subject. On the articles sent from this country, which include nearly all the necessaries for ship-building, the same duties are paid as by the Thames builders; added to which, the India builders have to pay the customs outward imposed on them by parliament, and the customs on importation into India, besides the freight, insurance, damage, &c. We cannot therefore but think the advocate of the Thames builders somewhat injudicious in adverting to the subject of their exclusive and ‘large contributions to the revenue.'

6

One of the most ingenious of these advocates, who signs himself 'Alfred,' has endeavoured to create an alarm among the 'numerous classes of the king's subjects whose trades are dependent on the equipment and employment of British-built shipping.' Mines, manufactures, colonies, agriculture, are all piled together with their several dependencies in a kind of structure resembling the House that Jack built,' beginning with the ship-builder all forlorn,' and proceeding, by a beautiful gradation, from the grower of oak timber to the vender of birch-brooms, from the anchorsmith to the pinmaker, and from the Baltic merchant to the retailer of old rope and oakum, all marshalled in aid of the ship-builder, who derives his knowledge from the arts and sciences!' It happens, however, unfortunately that, with the exception of timber, brooms, tallow, and candlewicks, the whole of the articles thus laboriously brought together, are sent out from this country (mostly in a manufactured state) for the use of the ship-builders of India; and generally in Thames-built ships. But such is the inconsistency of men who seek to make the worse appear the better reason,' that another of these advocates adduces the loss of the Java frigate, (which had on board the materials for fastening the Wellesley,) as an instance of the impropriety of building ships in India, from the liability to accident of those articles which are indispensably necessary in their construction, and which must be sent from Europe!

A third attempts to raise an alarm by telling us that India produces in abundance iron, copper, steel, lead, tin, and tar, cheap and excellent hemp, beef and pork, &c. It is certainly true that, in the interior, iron is made, but of so bad a quality as to be unfit for a hinge, much more for the bolts and fastenings of a ship. The East India Company send out annually many thousand tons of iron, and have this year exported upwards of 4,000 tons, in addition to what is carried out by individuals. It is also true that they make steel, but in small quantities, and at a most exorbitant price: we are not aware that this article is much used in ship-building. It is not true, however, that copper is the produce of India. A supply of

it is occasionally received from the mines of Diabeker, but the Indians have no means of converting it to the purposes of shipbuilding, for which the whole consumption is sent out from England in a manufactured state. Neither is it true that they possess either lead or tar. Tin is the produce of the Malay islands; but in whatever shape it is used in India it comes in that shape from England. Hemp indeed they have; and plenty of beef and pork, neither of which, however, they have yet been able to cure so as to keep at sea. Could this be done, we may be permitted to doubt whether the ship-owners and ship-builders of the Thames would be proof against the advantages of laying in their beef and pork in India, instead of lumbering their ships (as they now do) with these articles, not only for the homeward-bound voyage, but also to sell there for the use of India-built ships bound for Europe.

The fifth Resolution asserts that the employment of Indiabuilt ships will annihilate the principal market for British timber, discourage its cultivation, and render the supply of his Majesty's navy more precarious. This resolution involves a strange contradiction, on their own premises. The more timber there is consumed in building short-lived ships in the Thames, the sooner will the stock be annihilated, and, by the extravagant prices occasioned by scarcity, the more will the cultivation of it be encouraged; and on the contrary, the less timber there is consumed in the construction of merchant ships, the more will remain for the use of the navy.

The species of timber used for large Indiamen, is precisely that which, if left to grow some forty or fifty years longer, would be fit for line-of-battle ships; and therefore the surest step for preventing a supply of timber for his Majesty's navy becoming precarious,' would be that of restricting the building of large Indiamen in England, and resorting to our Indian territories, for as many of them as the limited means of that country will furnish. If, as the Thames builders assert, there is abundance of good native oak, which does not meet with a ready sale, the cheapness of it must give them so decided an advantage, as to drive India-built ships from all competition with theirs; if, on the other hand, there is a scarcity, with what justice can they object to a supply of shipping from our own territories, where it may be had in great abundance and of the first quality?

If there be no scarcity now, there certainly was none in 1805, when the state of the navy made it necessary to contract with the merchants for ten sail of the line. Since that time the consumption of oak timber has been prodigious; we may safely venture to state it at three million loads, (we believe it to be nearer six ;) yet these very persons, before any part of this enormous consumption

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took place, on the ground of an alleged scarcity, advanced the price of building from £24 10s.* to £36 per ton, being a rise of £47 per cent. or £20,700 on every 74-gun ship of the ordinary size. As tradesmen they may, for aught we know to the contrary, claim the right of taking advantage of the state of the market; but, having made a good bargain with the public, it is not very decorous to turn short round on their customers and tell them, after completing no less than forty-two sail of the line at the advanced price, that the idea of a scarcity is ridiculous, and that the introduction of fourteen India-built ships into the general commerce of the country in the course of nineteen years, is likely to annihilate the principal market for British timber.'

The advocates for the Thames builders adduce neither proof nor argument against the alleged scarcity of oak timber. What however they seem to consider as equivalent to both, is a statement of the secretary of the admiralty, in the House of Commons, of there being three years consumption of oak timber in the dock-yards :just before, the member for Westminster had asserted that in one of the principal of them there was not enough to build a 74gun ship. We mean not to question the correctness of either of these statements,-there may be as many loads of all kinds of timber as are required for three years consumption, but not as much of that particular kind as would complete a single line-of-battle ship, without having recourse to the expedients mentioned in a former article (to make small timber available where large was once considered indispensable.) But these advocates either do not or will not understand the difference between the consumption of the dock yards and the consumption of the navy,-the former having, of late years, been only about one half of the latter.

The sixth and last Resolution seems to have very little connection with the subject of ship-building. It is, in fact, a sop thrown out to those directors of the East India Company who are affected with the dread of colonization. The admission of a few black ships will estrange (they say) the affections of the parties engaged in it from the mother-country, make India the commencement and termination of their voyages, and render more equivocal and precarious the continuance of British influence and British power in that quarter of the globe;'-how it will produce these effects they do not condescend to tell us. Whether the ship of a merchant in India be English or India-built, her voyage will naturally commence where the owner resides; if in India, she returns there, and the owner, being on the spot, is better able to form a judgment of what will answer for the return voyage, than an owner residing in England,

The Victorious was contracted for at 24l. 10s. in December, 1803 ;—a little more than twelve months afterwards, ten ships of the line were contracted for at 361. per ton.

whe

who would look entirely to the merchandize required for the homeward voyage. The merchant in this country has the advantage of knowing what produce of India is most likely to be profitable for him to import, whilst the merchant in India has a similar advantage in the return cargo. The nation has therefore an equal interest in both one is calculated to supply the wants, the other to take off the surplus of the United Kingdom.

With all the difficulties which have hitherto opposed the remittances of fortunes made in India, we do not find that the affections of the parties engaged in the Indian trade have been estranged from the mother-country.' However unwilling men may be to leave the place where the bulk of their property is situated, the mauves of Great Britain ultimately return to the country where they first drew breath.

In conclusion, it is paying an ill compliment to the good sense of the nation to hold forth, as the shipping interest pretend to do, the advantages likely to ensue from a free intercourse with the countries to the eastward of the Cape of Good Hope,' and, in the same breath, to apply to the legislature to impose restraints and arbitrary laws on a class of His Majesty's subjects entitled by their birth-right to the same privileges as themselves, and without whom the advantages to be derived from a free trade' would be confined to a few London merchants, ship-builders, and ship-owners, frequently united in the same persons. Whether we view the subject as a matter of right or of expediency, we cannot but conceive that the builders and owners of India-built ships have a just and legal claim to participate in the commerce of the United Kingdom —a claim which, instead of being narrowed, ought, by all possible meaus, to be encouraged and enlarged, on the ground of carrying on a valuable branch of commerce in the best ships that are procurable, and thus giving to the British merchant an advantage over rival nations, into whose hands those ships and that commerce must otherwise inevitably fall.

ART. X.-Dépêches et Lettres interceptées, &c. Copies of the Original Letters and Dispatches of the Generals, Ministers, Grand Officers of State, &c. at Paris, to the Emperor Napoleon, at Dresden; intercepted by the advanced Troops of the Allies in the North of Germany. 8vo. pp. 382. Loudon. 1814. THIS publication has, we must confess, disappointed us. We had

understood that many public and private communications of great importance and interest had been intercepted in their way to and from the French head-quarters, by the light troops of the allies,