[Sidenote: Alarm in the United States at the idea of reciprocity.] The mere intimation of a design to inaugurate something like a policy of reciprocity, if not of entirely free-trade, struck alarm into the minds of the shipowners and shipbuilders of the United States. They held meetings, in which their patriotic feelings of indignation, as seems to have been the case in other countries as well, were singularly intermingled with a keen sense of self-interest, not perhaps very wisely directed. But, carried away by popular clamour, engendered but too often by parties who had only a very limited view of their own and of the national interests, the great mercantile bodies of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia strenuously opposed any remission of the American differential tonnage duties. They insisted that, taking anterior years as a guide, the loss to the revenue would not be less than $450,000 per annum. They viewed the project with alarm, believing that if carried out it must essentially injure the commerce of the United States; as its immediate effect, by opening the market for freight to the lowest bidder, would be to shift the carrying trade from the hands of their own merchants to those of foreigners. In this way the American shipowners argued that foreigners would build cheaper, equip cheaper, and sail their vessels at less cost than they could, at the same time intimating that Europeans were generally satisfied with a less profit than the American merchant could afford to receive. [Sidenote: Objections to the British Navigation Act.] [Sidenote: Threatened destruction to American shipping.] Accordingly, they contended that to meet the advances of Great Britain and to repeal the American countervailing Acts, would not be to place the two nations on an equal footing, so long as England retained her Navigation Act. The mutual repeal of differential tonnage duties they urged would not establish a perfect system of reciprocity; as the Americans, in that case, would thus permit Great Britain to carry to the United States, not only goods the growth or manufacture of that country, but of all others, while by maintaining in force her Navigation Act, the Americans would be expressly confined in their trade to the carriage of goods the growth or manufacture of the United States. British vessels would accordingly bring goods from England to America, take a freight in one of the ports of the United States to the British colonies, where American vessels are not admitted, and thence a third, home, making three freights in one voyage; so that foreigners would crowd their wharves, underbid their freight, monopolize their markets, and “leave American vessels idly to rot in their docks.”[319]