Nor was this agitation for relief confined to the Shipowners’ Society of London. Aberdeen, Dundee, Newcastle, Shields, and various other ports on the north-east coast, where, perhaps, foreign competition was most severely felt, sent in petitions to Parliament; while numerous pamphlets appeared in which the ostensible cause of the Shipowners’ suffering was duly set forth. We had the old stories retold of the huge Yankee ships eating up all their profits in the Indian trade, told, too, at a time when American shipowners were suffering quite as much as themselves. Nor did the authors of these pamphlets fail to remind us of our old hobgoblins, the Swedes and Norwegians, who, faring sumptuously on “black-bread,” were carrying all before them in the Northern Seas and in the Mediterranean, to the irretrievable ruin of the hapless British shipowners. Such tales of sorrow from the outports, including Liverpool, Glasgow, and those on the west coast of Scotland, where not a few of these “ruined” men had realised handsome fortunes during the Crimean War, made a deep impression on the bosom of the General Shipowners’ Society of London, whose hearts had been softened by their own “losses.”[178] They, too, as we have seen, entirely coincided with their brethren of the outports as to the cause of the depression: and, while it was resolved to continue pouring in the petitions to Parliament expressive of their views and praying for relief, and, also, to stir up an agitation through the medium of pamphlets and that portion of the press which entertained similar opinions to their own, it was likewise considered desirable to make a combined effort by the means of a public meeting to be held in London, so that their sufferings and their wrongs might become generally known among all classes of the community. [Sidenote: Meeting of Shipowners, December 15th, 1858.] [Sidenote: Their proposal.] This meeting was consequently held at the London Tavern on the 15th December, 1858. The chairman, however, Mr. Duncan Dunbar, then one of the greatest individual shipowners in the kingdom, in opening the proceedings, declared that no idea was entertained of asking for a reversal of recent legislation, the delegates from the outports having previously come to the resolution to limit their demands to the consideration of the question of reciprocity, praying the Crown at the same time to put in motion the clauses of the Navigation Repeal Act, which authorize the Queen to retaliate on such foreign Powers as should refuse reciprocity, and to place the ships of these countries on, as nearly as possible, the same footing as that in which British ships are placed in the ports of such country.