Excerpt from Manchester Ship Canal Bill, Session 1884: Reply of Mr. Pember, Q. C., On Behalf of the Promoters of the Bill, Before the Select Committee of the House of Lords, 20th, 21st, and 22nd May, 1884 Now, my lords, this Bill is the outcome of a long feeling and develop ment of a long standing idea, applied as a remedy. Engineer after engineer has schemed it; Parliament, in Act after Act, has safeguarded it it is based upon the universal conviction that, in the cost Of produc tion, transit is the last great factor which it is possible for us to reduce. That is the meaning of the Bill, and I will say at this point how irrational has been the dislike with which the project has been met. There has been, quite apart from all question of its feasibility - quite apart from all question of damage to the railway gradients or anything of that nature, quite apart from the question of injury to the Mersey - there has been, I say, a sort of irritation against Lancashire for not having rested content with things as they are, and especially against Manchester and my clients as the leaders and organ and mouthpiece of that discontent. The very folk who would have been the loudest against any attempt to feed and foster the industries of foreigners by the imposition of the smallest import duty are equally angry with us for a perfectly legitimate attempt upon our part to cheapen home production. Really it would seem as if there were a certain class, and by no means a small class, in the country. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.