For these reasons, an organisation of merchants in Montreal, and in various towns in Canada, who had leagued themselves as Free-traders and had been very active in disseminating their views, as well as in enforcing them, with all the influence they could command, on the colonial Governor, and on the English Executive and both Houses of Parliament, now demanded the total repeal of the British Navigation Laws. They did not, however, stand alone in their desire for unrestricted navigation. The West Indies, as soon as they found that the British Parliament had taken away the protection afforded to them by the differential duties, were as loud in their complaints as the Canadians, the more so, as having been deprived of all protection on their sugars by Lord John Russell’s Equalization Act of 1847, it became indispensable to get their produce conveyed to market at the cheapest possible rate of freight, so as to compete, with any chance of success, with their foreign rivals. They therefore denounced the Navigation Laws in no measured terms; and when Montreal petitioned that its corn should be admitted into the ports of Great Britain in ships of any nation their merchants thought proper to charter, the West Indians preferred the same request, in order to secure the lowest cost of transport for their sugar. While, therefore, the colonists were urging the adoption of the principle of an entire free trade with the colonies, many capitalists of England, and, especially, the shipowners, viewed with great alarm the total abandonment of what was known as our “colonial system,” and declared their apprehension that such a change would throw the carrying trade into the hands of the United States. Clinging to Protection, they said, in their memorials to Parliament, “that the only remaining thing connected with our whole important and most magnificent colonial system, which enabled us to baffle the efforts of the whole world united against us, was that part of the system under which the produce of the colonies was obliged to be brought to this country in British ships.” These alarmists declared that such a relaxation as the colonists now demanded would ruin them inevitably. Regarding every concession which had been made to the Americans during the preceding half century, having as it had for its object increased intercourse with the West Indies, as a pernicious policy, tending to injure British colonies and to encourage American trade, they alleged that the protection of the colonies had not been carried far enough; that British shipowners could not exist without Protection; that the uncertainty prevailing with respect to the Navigation Laws was productive of injury to the country, as no persons would embark capital in shipping; and, further, that, as regarded the West Indies, it was not the _general_ wish of the colonists that the Navigation Laws should be repealed. [Sidenote: Views of Manchester and Liverpool.]