"These are the biggest docks in Lunnun, sir," said he: "say what they will on the other docks. We will hold two hundred million tons of merchandise here, sir, and we will not be crowded at all. Why, sir, I've seen as much as two hundred thousand casks of sugar, five hundred thousand bags of coffee, fifty thousand pipes of Jimaky rum, ten thousand pipes of Madeery, twenty-five thousand tons of logwood, and lots of other things here and we were not full. "I've seen an acre of 'ogsheads of tibaccy, eight feet high, and piles of cinnamon, spices, pepper, indigo, salt pork, hides and leather, Hindian corn, mahogany, and sich like, and no one of us, sir, ever knows the walley of them, and I suppose Mr. Bright hiself would be more nor puzzled to tell the walley, and I've heard as how he has got a preshis head for figgers." Formerly when steamers employed paddle wheels as a means of locomotion, the docks were very much crowded, but the use of the universal screw has given much more space for berthways. There is, however, great risks in these docks, of fire, from steam vessels, and I believe the rates are much higher for steam craft than for sailing vessels. Small offices and compact frame houses for the company's officers, revenue officers, warehousemen, clerks, engineers, coopers and other petty attachees, have been provided within the ground area of all these stone basins, and everything connected with the docks is done in a systematic and business like way that is truly wonderful. When I recollected that less than fifty years ago London had no inclosed docks at all, and no accommodation for shipping but a long and straggling line of private quays, under the management of firms who had no public interests to serve, (and in fact when the present system of docks was at first proposed it met with almost universal opposition, particularly from the interested parties,) I was amazed at the progress made in a half century. There is not such a city in the world, perhaps, for the number of corporations, guilds, societies, and titled people, who derive and did derive emolument and income, of one kind or another, from these private quay and wharfage receipts. [Sidenote: OPPOSITION TO THE NEW DOCK SYSTEM.] Therefore when the citizens of London became thoroughly awakened to the possibility of substituting for these rotten old timber wharves and tumble down old stone piers, a thorough, efficient, and lasting system of dockage, the interested people began to clamor most hideously about their "vested rights." These two words have always stood in England as a safeguard to protect some oppressive or corporate interest.