Lord Brougham then entered fully into the merits of the general question, calling upon their Lordships not to part rashly with what had been called the miserable remnants, the fragments of a worn-out system. “Fragments, indeed! They are of gigantic size; they are the splendid remains of a mighty system; they are the pillars of our navy; the props of our maritime defence.” He showed that there remained the almost entire monopoly of our home trade, and the perfectly rigorous monopoly of our colonial trade, employing above a million and a half of shipping, and 20,000 seamen, with a capital that gave export and import to between fifteen and sixteen millions sterling in the year. He further insisted that the restrictions affecting Canada could be easily removed without unsettling our whole policy. The policy of the Navigation Laws rested, in his opinion, on the position that, without such a partial monopoly as they gave to British shipping, we never could maintain a sufficiently ample nursery for our navy, an object of primary importance to every insular empire, and, therefore, to be sought at a considerable sacrifice of the wealth unfettered commerce might more rapidly accumulate. [Sidenote: Napoleon’s desire for ships, colonies, and commerce.] The Emperor Napoleon I. has been cited as having wished “for ships, colonies, and commerce.” The quotation is not quite accurate.[123] He inveighed against “the ships, colonies, and commerce of England,” and mentioned these as the object of his hostility; whence Mr. Pitt, at a Guildhall festival, gave as a retaliatory toast, “the ships, colonies, and commerce of England,” a retort which derived its point from the French Emperor’s hostility against these special objects. Lord Brougham, in his splendid declamatory style, showed how Napoleon must have wished in vain—for we had swept the seas of his navy, captured all his colours—because we had created our own marine, which, he argued, owed its existence entirely to the encouragement the Navigation Laws gave to ship-building, and the facilities lent by the same laws to the manning our fleets, which that encouragement had created. For nearly two hundred years, he continued, we had abided by that policy; and holding steadily our course, neither swerving to the right nor to the left, never abandoning it, only adapting it to varying events which have altered the distribution of dominion in other regions, we have upheld the system which has made our navy the envy of our rivals, the terror of our enemies, and the admiration of the world. “Are you,” exclaimed his Lordship, with one of those bursts of ready eloquence for which he was so conspicuous in debate, “prepared to abandon a system to which you owe so precious a possession, not only the foundation of your glory, the bulwark of your strength, but the protection of your very existence as a nation?”