Mr. Lloyd-George visited Liverpool on Saturday last, and at the
annual banquet of the Liverpool Shipbrokers' Society defended the attitude of the Board of Trade towards the shipping industry. While opposed to excluding the best foreigners, such as the Scandinavians, from our mercantile marine, he would gladly see the places of the thirty-nine thousand or forty thousand foreigners taken by men of British nationality. There had been, however, an arrest in the upward progress of the number of foreigners in our service during the past two years— the figures being lower by some hundreds—while the increase in British sailors amounted to four thousand. He held that the Government ought substantially to encourage the efforts which were being made in the Liverpool district to train sailors for the merchant marine. With regard to German competition, he noted that in 1900 the excess of our gross tonnage over Germany's was ten millions ; in 1906 it was thirteen millions; and while in 1901 there were sixty-three vessels in the world of over ten thousand tons, of which twenty-seven were British and twenty-four German, this year, out of a total of a hundred and four, we bad fifty-three, and Germany only twenty-seven.
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