Apart from the Great Western Company's intervention this is a case of Manchester against Liverpool; in other words, it is a struggle between a manufacturing and a commercial interest. Now, sir, what is called the balance of power in the British Constitution, meaning as it does the equipoise caused by conflicting interests and passions, is a principle which is not confined to constitutional forms, but works out throughout the whole body of society; and we find a gradual tendency in latter days to conflicts between classes, and classes which were before allied together against other classes. We know the distinctions between land and trade, speaking generally, and the conflicts which have ensued. In these latter days we have had trade subdivided into manufactures and commerce.... What you are asked to do now is to humble a commercial interest at the instance of a manufacturing interest.... There can be no doubt, sir, that if we contrast the habits of mind of different classes, commercial pursuits give a different tone and a different feeling. I am not saying it is better, I am not saying it is worse--that is not my question--but a different tone and feeling from what manufacturing pursuits do. I will not even analyse the cause of it; but I may state this much, that commerce has that which manufacture has not. It has its traditions and its history upon a higher and very different footing: it has even its romance and its poetry. A profession exercised within a port which is associated with such names as those of Tyre, of Byzantium, of Venice, of Genoa, of the Hanse Towns, and many of the chief cities of history, may be said to have some liberal features which I do not say are beneficial; I am merely saying that they are different from those which arise out of the associations of manufacture. Images of greatness and of splendour are connected with the one much more than with the other, and the term 'merchant princes' is a term which neither historians nor orators would treat as otherwise than properly applied to many of the chief men of the cities which I have named in former days, and many of the chief men of the cities with which we are now dealing. Moreover commerce brings the parties engaged in it into connection and contact with almost the whole known world. Liverpool is not the Liverpool of Lancashire only, or of Cheshire only, or of England only; Liverpool is the Liverpool of India, of China, of Africa, of North and South America, of Australia--the Liverpool of the whole habitable globe; and she has her features of distinction; she has her habits of thought and feeling, her traditions of mind fostered by influences such as these. There she sits upon the Mersey, a sort of queen of the seas; and Manchester, her sister, looks at her and loves her not. _She_ too is great, and _she_ too is powerful--but she is not Liverpool, and she cannot become Liverpool. At Liverpool she is lost in the throng of nations and the multitude of commerce; she is merely one of the many customers of the port. Well, as she cannot equal Liverpool, what is the next thing? It is to pull down Liverpool; to make Liverpool, forsooth, the Piraeus of such an Athens as Manchester! That, sir, will suit her purpose, but will it suit yours?... No commercial interests can act, sir, more than any other interests, without some local association, without some united home, such as is afforded in the constitution of our own port.... To found upon injustice, and to proceed by agitation, to put down a rival whom they cannot help admiring though they cannot love--that, sir, is a process neither worthy of them nor likely to accord with the views of the constitutional politician, who is willing indeed that, according to the natural force of circumstances and the development of time, every interest should acquire its legitimate position in the balance of power under the constitution, but who certainly would not lend his aid to destroy by anticipation and violently any of those great commercial landmarks which remain--and long may they remain--in this country, standing monuments of the past, and affording in the present working of different political passions and interests a counterpoise, the loss of which would soon be felt, and would lead every one to regret the legislation which had converted this bill into an Act. (Pp. 213, 214, 221- 4.)