modern geological science has enabled the miners to sink their shafts with great precision, while modern mechanical science has cheapened locomotion and enabled them to deliver enormous quantities of water from great depths. Thus then to come back to our economical argument, we must look to modern science, and to inspection, for the purpose of lessening the expense of raising coal.* 'State care and better knowledge,' these are Mr. Mather's recommendations.

Having got the fuel to the pit mouth, immediately various exactions seize upon it. The land being chiefly in the hands of a few great proprietors, who are also the owners of the collieries, heavy monopolist charges are made for leave to the lessees to carry their coal to the places of shipment on the river Tyne. The 'tram-roads,' formerly wooden, now iron single lines of railway, passing to the river from the pit, pay, under the quaint old feudal names of 'wayleave,' 'double damage,' 'tentale,' &c., excessive tolls for the privilege. Free parliamentary lines of railway through the great coal-fields are the cure for this evil; and a vigorous effort, in the session of Parliament for 1852-3, to procure such a railway through the great northern fields of steam coal to the deep water docks at the mouth of the Tyne, though unsuccessful with regard to the proposed railway, because arrayed against the whole monopolist system, from the duke to the 'freeman,' which exists in and round Newcastle, had the effect of so completely opening the eyes of Parliament to the injustice of the wayleave system,' that no future railway will be permitted to be burdened with this impost. Meantime the wayleave tax remains to raise the price of coals on the Tyne, and as speedily as may be, it should be abolished. One great landowner alone on the Tyne levies a tax of £10,000 a year on coals in Wayleaves. The main objection to the system, however, is that it excludes large coal fields from the market, and combines with the other monopolies of Tyne side.

Next come the dangers and the dues of the river Tyne, both of them resulting from the rapacity and carelessness of the corporation of Newcastle.

The dues may soon be dismissed. Since the nineteenth century commenced, the town, the corporation-that is, the house landlords of Newcastle-have taken from the commerce of the nation on the Tyne at least A MILLION OF POUNDS STERLING, which has

* A proper staff of inspectors with liberal salaries; an examining board, which should also be a board of appeal in cases where the government inspector's advice was rejected by a local viewer-some such organization as this seems required to secure the proper inspection of collieries. The expense is, of course, always the objection. Suppose the examining board cost £4000; six inspectors, £6000; twelve sub-inspectors, £2400; and that 500 lives were saved-as it is believed they would, by proper care-this at £25 a man would ‘pay.'

been either wasted or used to pay the rates of these landlords, or abstracted from the 'soil' of the Tyne, or applied to build up and aggrandize Newcastle town; while the river, from whose ships the dues were taken, under pretence of 'conserving' and improving its navigation, is, like the Thames, worse than when the century began.* There are no docks on the Tyne, which these dues might long ere this have built;-no docks, but abundance of dangerous sands in the river; no piers to shut out the stormy billows at the mouth of the Tyne, though half the sum which the corporation has received during the last fifty years would have built them :-no piers to shelter the 42,000 arrivals and sailings of the Tyne, but there still are those deadly reefs, the Black Middens,' and the Herd Sand,' with their manifold wrecks and perishing seamen annually, as the winter storms come round. It is awful to think of the tragedies which have occurred at the mouth of the Tyne;-the gallant ships wrecked, the gallant lives lost,- all, or almost all of which might, in the opinion of the best engineers, have been saved, had the corporation of Newcastle been true to their trust on the river. Thirty-six ships were wrecked at the entrance of the Tyne during the first week of January, 1854; during one storm alone thirty-six ships! Multitudes of lives have been engulphed in the deadly breakers which stretch in every storm across the mouth of this great port,-appalling annual tragedies! enacted before the eyes of thousands congregated on the cliffs, wives, children, friends, who have watched with quailing hearts the gallant vessel near the deadly reef, seen the fatal shock, and beheld the crew perish! Ah! the wild farewells waved by the doomed seamen, struggling among the breakers, which these cliffs and shores have seen! The wife, through streaming tears, has seen the manly arm-sole stay, protection, and hope of herself and her children-wave to her, steadily, mournfully, a last adieu of love and anguish ; and as she raised her listening head from the vain, agonized effort to catch his voice,-oh, horror! there his body was hanging a lifeless corpse in the shrouds! All that the eye can behold of the tragic and the terrible; all that the human heart can suffer of horror and anguish, has been seen and suffered at the mouth of the Tyne. And but for the avarice of this corporation, the short-sighted selfishness of these landlords of Newcastle, these heartrending spectacles might have been replaced by vast protecting arms of stone to shelter the flying vessel and enable her to deliver her crew into the warm embraces of their friends! Oh! who can feel anything but fierce indignation and bitter scorn for these selfish and cruel men. Yes! the grand

Mr. S. Leach, engineer of the Thames, declared before the royal commission that it was worse; the Admiralty know well that the Tyne is worse.

markets and quays of the town of Newcastle are built upon the bodies and cemented with the blood of the seamen of the Tyne; for had the shipping dues which have built them been expended for the protection and benefit of the shipping, millions of property, hundreds of lives would have been saved, which at the mouth of the Tyne alone have perished.

While this million of money has thus been taken from the river and applied by the landlords of Newcastle to build their public edifices and relieve their municipal rates, the navigation of the river, as has been proved before several Admiralty commissions during the past few years, has been growing worse. The corporation of Newcastle on the Tyne, like that of London on the Thames, were the conservators or public trustees of the navigation; but the object of both has been, without much regard to their trust, to secure to themselves individually as much of the public revenues as possible.

The property along the shores of the river has been embanked, to the injury of the general navigation; and, above all, to the great injury of the most important part of the navigation-that, viz., of the harbour and deep water near the sea. Every year, as the size of our ships is increasing,* the importance of preserving the deep water of our bars and harbours becomes greater, yet every year the old conservators are banking out the tidal water which can alone preserve the depth of the lower reaches of our navigable rivers, and scour down the bars. The land so embanked from the tidal bed-which really belongs to the public, and is under the protection, first of the Crown as chief custodier of all navigable rivers, then of the Admiralty as agent for the Crown, and finally of the conservators as local trustees or agents for the public-these valuable foreshores have been seized by the corporation or their friends, and converted into landed estates for themselves.

*The average tonnage of British ships entered inwards in foreign and colonial trades was in

The average tonnage of British ships employed in all trades, steamers and sailing together (except river steamers), was in

The ships registered in the Port of Shields are, in 1854, above 1100 in number, containing 257,712 tons, averaging therefore 235 tons each,—about three millions of shipping property registered in Shields alone, the average size of the ships increasing every year. But the number of large vessels-those above 500 tons-which can never reach the upper part of the Tyne, is increasing rapidly; and soon there will be 20,000 arrivals and sailings of vessels, which can never pass above the deep water of Shields,

The corporation of London, indeed, declare that they now keep sacred the revenues derived from the river-side property, and apply it to the improvement of the river-a very questionable statement even at the present day; while every one who knows that after the Great Fire of London the intention of government was to preserve a noble quay from Westminster to Wapping, and that the whole site has been long since filched from the river, must be aware that the corporation of London has not always made even this pretence of honesty.

On the Wear, too, the river soil and foreshores are considered public property; but the Newcastle corporation is still unblushingly claiming for itself and its supporters these river-side estates, which could only have been embanked from the river by the authority they possessed as conservators or trustees for the public under the Admiralty and the Crown.

A royal commission to investigate this shameful business in the Tyne, with an admiral at its head, will meet, perhaps before these words see the light; and every friend of free trade and foe of such public depredations must hope that this royal commission will, at last, vindicate the ancient title of the Crown, as chief trustee for the public, to the soil and foreshores of all our navigable rivers. With our rapidly increasing commerce, and ships increasing in size in a corresponding ratio, to sacrifice a noble deep-water harbour like that of Shields, and the navigation of a great river like the Tyne, to a set of incorporate landlords, will surely no longer be tolerated by the government or the House of Commons. The Tyne is the greatest port in the north; it has more arrivals and sailings than any port in the whole world; its tonnage is half as much as that of all Scotland, greater than that of all Ireland; yet with a million of money thus alienated from the ships to the town of Newcastle, the river Tyne has no docks! During these fifty years, not fifty shillings have been spent on the harbour of Shields, where almost the whole of the ships lie on which that million of money has been levied, and beyond which the large ships never pass. Does not this call loudly for redress?

Again, the Tyne, Wear, and Tees, ports lying within thirty miles of each other, possess a larger tonnage than the three great ports of Britain-London, Liverpool, and Glasgow ;* the passing and repassing therefore of ships along the iron-bound eastern coast is enormously great; one-fourth of the whole of the wrecks of the United Kingdom take place within seventy miles of coast,

* The united outward-bound sailing tonnage of the Tyne, the Wear, and the Tees, amounted to 9400 ships more than there were from London, Liverpool, and Glasgow together; but that the tonnage of these was nearly equal.''Parliamentary Return,' 1853.

See also a statement by Mr. James Mather, wherein this subject is ably handled, Mareh, 1854.

of which the Tyne is the centre; yet the corporation of Newcastle, which has absorbed from the ships this million of money, will not even now give up (till she is compelled) the £10,000 which she still alienates from the river, for the purpose of assisting to convert the Tyne into a harbour of refuge!

Deputations from all the communities on the Tyne, in March, 1854, waited on the Admiralty, the President of the Board of Trade, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to solicit aid from the government towards converting the Tyne into a harbour of refuge; but Sir James Graham, Mr. Cardwell, and Mr. Gladstone very properly refused to listen to the application until these local shipping dues were restored to their legitimate use. For the Newcastle corporation, after robbing the Tyne of a million of money since the century set in, and continuing to rob it still of £10,000 a-year, to go sturdy beggar-like to solicit help from the purse of the nation, must certainly have appeared to those heads of departments most unparalleled and astounding impudence! It is very clear that until the local taxation of the ships is abolished, Newcastle will never receive any aid from the national purse for this truly national purpose of converting the Tyne into a harbour of refuge.

Besides this heavy direct 'town' due on coals, and the tax inflicted on the coal trade by the want of docks, and the sacrifice of life and property through the dangerous nature of the Tyne, ballast dues of the most unjust nature have been and are inflicted on the shipping. Were the ballast-the delivery of which is a monopoly removed from the ships in 'hoppers,' or barges, as on the Wear, the shipowner would not be subjected to above half of his present expense. The system of quaying off the shores of the river, by means of which the corporation have gained large riverside estates, is still under the present commissioners carried on. In the year 1850 the conservancy of the Tyne was, after a struggle which cost the river funds between £20,000 and £30,000, transferred to a commission; but Newcastle holds a majority in this commission, and, in spite of all the efforts of the minority, the old system is still pursued.

The commissioners who now act as conservators of the Tyne are eighteen in number: six of these, impressed with the magnitude of the injury which Newcastle is inflicting on the national interests by banking out the tidal water, have, after exhausting every effort at the local board, at length memorialized the Lords of the Admiralty to arrest this disastrous engineering.

The gentlemen of the minority state that the system of river management, pursued first by the corporation of Newcastle, and since 1850 by the Tyne commission, the constitution of which body practically continues to the corporation, and to some extent to the same individuals, the control of the river.' And