imposed on-that you acted on false statements and inflammatory appeals -that you were led in a great degree by factious demagogues and dissenting Ministers, they should have thought your opinion more worthy of correction than obedience. They should not have exalted these factious demagogues and dissenting Ministers into dictators to Parliament on a question of such immense importance. When they had to decide between one body of British subjects and another, their decision should have been one of strict impartiality; they should not, sir, have leaned to the powerful and the misled, against the weak and the suffering. Your Ministers court spurious popularity so much, that they are in great danger of losing popularity of every description. A Minister who obeys public caprice, who takes newspapers and petitions for his guides, and who strives to follow, and not lead, public opinion, will never be popular in this country. He must have an opinion of his own; he must boldly declare this opinion, even though the public voice be against him; he must speak plain and naked truth, and the whole truth; he must deal in accurate calculations and powerful reasons; he must take his stand upon right, truth, and justice, careless whom he pleases and whom he offends; and he will carry the whole nation along with him. This will be the popular Minister. Sir, not withstanding your vagaries, you are a right honest and sensible person. You love freedom, and you wish every one, even your Ministers, to be free; you love a daring fellow who will think for himself, and hector you out of your mad errors; you are a passionate admirer of blunt integrity, downright truth, and mighty argument. The Minister who is himself a John Bull in heart, speech, and action, will be worshipped by John Bull-will be followed through fire and water by John Bull-will have life and treasure, and everything else, recklessly hazarded for him by John Bull.

Your Ministers, sir, by listening to your foolish clamour, have raised a constitutional question between themselves and the Colonies, which ought never to have been raised; and which they durst not have raised if the Colonies had been more powerful, or if there had been a strong and constitutional Opposition in Parliament. This

compelling of legislatures, even if they be colonial ones, sounds very oddly to British ears. The "power in Parlia ment," of which the Ministers speak so confidently, may exist, but I am not sure that it does, or that it ought to exist. This changing of the old and regularly enacted laws of the Colonies by despotic compulsion-by the cannon and the bayonet-is a thing, sir, that I can scarcely reconcile with my ideas of British rights. I am aware that the supreme authority dwells here, but I am not sure that the exercise of this authority is without limitations. I am aware that this authority has a right to originate, and refuse to sanction, but I am not sure that it has a right to command and compel-to be despotic. I know that great authorities have had no doubts on the matter; but I still have mine, and I will give the benefit of them to those who cannot resist, and who must suffer. It is hateful to me, sir, to see Parliament thus raising questions be tween its own rights and the rights of its subjects-to see it arming the Executive with despotic power against individual property and privileges. I do not love these unanimous Parliaments I cannot endure them.

It follows from this conduct of yourself and your rulers, that the property of an immense number of British subjects-property which previously was worth very many millions-has been in a great measure deprived of value. Estates in the Colonies cannot be sold -those who have lent money on them cannot recall it—and many whose income depended on them are left without income. The Colonists have been plunged into embarrassments and bankruptcy. What more could be done by any tyranny? Where is the tyranny in the world that would thus strip of its security, and destroy, property? What is the difference to a man whether his property be taken from him on the highway, or destroyed by acts of the government? I ask you, sir, as an Englishman, if English liberty will sanction one part of the community in defaming, trampling upon, and ruining another? Of your rights and liberties in the matter I need not speak, but I ask you what has become of the rights and liberties of the colonists? The wrongs that are heaped on these traduced, persecuted, oppressed, and plundered men, are a

disgrace to the British name, and a scandalous violation of British justice.

You are thus, sir, depriving yourself of a very large portion of trade which these Colonies would otherwise yield you at this moment-you are depriving a great number of British manufacturers, artisans, and labourers, of employment and bread-and you are taking effectual steps for depriving yourself of the trade altogether. If you persevere in your present mad course, these Colonies will soon be the property of another nation, or to you perfectly worthless.

Look next, sir, at your shipping another of the leading sources of your riches the soul of your navy-the foundation of your naval supremacy the parent and preserver of your foreign trade-the instrument that gives cohesion and unity to the scattered portions of the empire. Your Navigation Laws, which you extolled so much when you were a statesman, you could not endure when you became a philosopher. They imposed restrictions upon foreign ships for the benefit of your own, and your liberality was enraged at it. You removed the restrictions from the foreign vessel, placed them practically upon the British one, and this you called giving freedom to your trade. You positively swore, and your rulers swore the same, that the monopoly on several points, which these restrictions gave to your shipping, did you mischief; and that the giving away of your carrying trade would benefit you. With the fact before you, that the foreign vessel could be built and navigated at little more than half the cost of the British one, you protested that you should be able to compete with the foreigner. Sir, incredible as it may seem, you actually committed this outrageous folly. What has followed? Your capitalists are transferring their money to foreign vessels-these vessels are rapidly monopolising your European carrying trade-your own are rotting in your harbours-your shipowners are sinking to ruin-your sailors are starving-and your shipbuilders are without employment. I need not point out how much this must depress consumption, and injure your trade, foreign and domestic.

Your manufacturers, my worthy Friend, possessed a monopoly of your market; and as soon as you turned VOL. XIX.

philosopher, you protested that this monopoly interfered with the freedom of your trade most grievously. You abolished it, declaring, however, at the same time, that you wished to sell as many manufactures as possible. Instead of it you adopted protecting duties, which you asserted would place the British manufacturer and the foreign one on a level in your market. Now what are these protecting duties at present, for some of them seem to have been recently altered? You have one of 30 per cent on silks, one of 20 per cent on cottons and woollens, and one of 40 per cent on linens. Now if 30 per cent be sufficient for silks, how does it happen that cottons and woollens require 20, and linens 40 per cent? How does it happen that cottons and woollens require any protection at all to place the Englishman on a level with the foreigner? Is this your levelling? Is this your justice between trade and trade? Is this your abolition of restriction and prohibition? Out upon your partiality, injustice, and deceptions-your philosophical cheats and abortive quackery! There is not a single protecting duty in your whole scale, that places the Englishman and the foreigner on an equality; and most of these duties are, and will be, alter them as you please, prohibitions to the one or the other.

Need I once more point to the situation to which your Free Trade reduced the silk and glove manufacturers? Many of your other manufacturers could not be directly injured at home by your wild horror of monopoly, but they are all suffering from it in other ways. They have lost a considerable part of their colonial trade, and this has caused them to lose a considerable part of their other export trade. The diminished consumption of the colonial proprietors, seamen, &c. resident in England, the silk and glove manufacturers, the ship-owners, shipbuilders, &c. has greatly reduced their home trade, and this again has reduced their export trade. Your Free Trade has reduced your manufacturers generally to distress, and many of them to the deepest distress; and they will have tenfold more distress heaped upon them, if it be persevered in to the extent that is threatened. The liberality of this is wonderful, for it starves the Englishman to feed 4 N

the foreigner Is your philosophy, sir, French, or Turkish?

Your Agriculture, my good sir, has thus far escaped the terrible visitations of your philosophy, and it naturally forms your only interest that is not suffering. Corn is barely at remunerating prices, and if the season be favourable, your next crop will be the largest one that you have had for several years. A sane man, sir-I will not say a wise one-would imagine, that in such a state of things no new legislation was called for by Agriculture. You and your rulers, who, I fear, are at present neither wise nor sane, think differently; and in the next year Agriculture is to be hacked and hewed to pieces, that it may receive philosophical torture and destruction. The reasons assigned for this are the most unaccountable ones that human folly ever fabricated. It is said, that this country has not for a long period grown sufficient corn for its own consumption. This is said in the teeth of conclusive proofs, that it has only at intervals of some years imported comparatively trifling quantities of corn after short harveststhat for nearly seven years, previously to the last one, it imported none, save a small quantity of oats and black corn-and that its importations previously to 1819, aided by other causes, injured its agriculture so much, as to prevent it from growing infinitely more than the amount of these importations. This is nothing-proofs are nothing when they are unsavoury to Free Trade. Because you may happen to want a little foreign corn once in four or five years, your ports are to be constantly open to the corn of the whole world. This is to be the case, when your rulers have the present condition of the wool and cotton markets before them-this is to be the case, when every member of the community, women not excepted, must know, that if the ports had been open for corn during the last two years, the agriculturists would have been at present as much distressed as the cotton weavers, and the nation would have been nothing but a scene of the most bitter distress;- would have been enduring the most horrible misery that it has ever endured since it became a nation. Then, sir, your rulers r rulers say, that the manent opening of the ports is es

sential for keeping the price of corn steady. Their refined philosophy cannot bear, that bread should fluctuate a farthing per pound, and wheat eight or ten shillings per quarter, in the course of the year. They are, in their own judgment, to do what Heaven itself could alone do, that is, they are to keep wheat at the same price in June and July which it bears in November and December! It is astonishing, that mortal vanity or mortal ignorance could have hit upon anything so extravagant. These efforts of your rulers to prove that they are more than men, will prove something that they little anticipate.

Then, one of your Ministers, whom I cannot prevail on myself to name when I speak of him unfavourably, has borrowed the slang of the Cockney prints-your Ministers now steal from these prints in a very barefaced way

and has said, that the Corn Laws tax the country to the amount of many millions annually. This is precisely the same thing as saying, that if these laws were not in existence, the wages of labour, and the gross profits of trade, both in rate and amount, would not be in the least different from what they are-it is precisely the same thing as saying, that whether corn be high or low, it never causes the smallest variation in wages and trading prices

it is precisely the same thing as. saying, that if the Corn Laws were not in existence, the agriculturists would contribute exactly what they do, and the traders would not have to contribute a farthing more than they do, to the revenue. Sir, that is a very singular kind of political economy, which gives to your tax-regulators notions like this touching taxation. Those people, sir, have information which very few possess, who know that your traders, mechanics, labourers, &c. would have as much money to buy corn with, if it were at half the price, as they have at present. I think, that any man who will compare the general condition of these traders, mechanics, &c. with that of those of other nations which have no Corn Laws, may easily convince himself that the Corn Laws of this country do anything rather than tax it.

Then, sir, another of your Ministers, borrowing likewise from the Cockney prints, declares that your Corn Laws form a prohibition-that he hates

prohibition, and that, therefore, they ought to be altered. He declares this when he knows, that when corn reaches a certain price, these laws open your ports for it to the world. If your Ministry will thus offer its nose to the finger and thumb of the Cockney press, I fear that ill-tongued people will be giving it the name of the Cockney Ministry.

For reasons like these, my good friend-yes, for reasons like these the laws that regulate your Agriculture are to be altered. Your agriculturists are at present almost the only stay of commerce and manufactures -they are barely free from suffering -corn barely obtains the prices that the Ministry and all sides of Parliament admit it ought to obtain-probability is altogether against any rise in these prices worth speaking ofand yet your Agriculture is to be madly plunged into chaos and misery. When I look at these things, they almost convince me that Heaven' has doomed your empire to destruction: they cannot be accounted for on natural

causes.

If your Agriculture were suffered to flourish, it would soon cause commerce and manufactures to flourish. This you could not endure. You sigh for uniformity, but it is for a uniformity of ruin and hunger. The fallen are not to be raised; but because some are fallen, all are to be dragged down to the dust. After having brought many of your great interests to distress, and rendered the distress of the others inevitable, you are, to make the philosophical ruin complete--changing your

currency.

For many years you have had a paper currency, and every one owns that it has contributed most essentially to your wealth and prosperity.

You have been infinitely more rich and prosperous with a paper currency than you would have been with a gold one; but what of this? You want a currency for its name and shape, and not for its uses. What care you for riches and prosperity? What are they, compared with a philosophical currency? Bank-notes, you say, give you high prices. You know from experience that high prices give you abundance and happiness, and low ones want and misery; but this is nothing. You want philosophical prices, and not prices that you can thrive

from. What matters it if you are brought to bankruptcy and starvation, provided your prices are fixed by philosophy? By what possibility, sir, have you enabled yourself to conquer and trample upon old English common sense in this manner?

Nothing, my worthy sir, is to be spared that can be struck at. Here are the Catholics of Ireland clamouring for admission into your Executive and Legislative. What are they in principles, looking at the body? Examine the speeches of their leaderstheir sentiments, touching the treasonable address from America-their abuse of your Church-the foul slanders they heap upon the most estimable of your public men-their fiendish attacks upon your Bible, School, and other Societies-their rancorous hatred of Protestantism-their connexion with revolutionary teachers-theiranimosity towards England—and their affection for the Catholic governments of other countries. A large portion of your Ministers and Legislators-the majority in your House of Commonshas decided that these Catholics shall be admitted into the Ministry and Parliament on these terms-they are to be suffered to legislate for your Church and Religion, although they have again and again declared that the Irish portion of this Church ought to be robbed and overthrown; and your Government and Parliament are to be strictly prohibited from interfering with their own Church and Religion. Their Church, which governs the body, and is connected with, and controlled by, the Catholicism of Europe, is to be placed above the regulation of your Government. This Church has usurped a most important part of the sovereign authority, and it is to retain it; the sovereign authority is to be divided between this Church and your Government; it is not to belong to the latter. That this would place the Irish Catholic above the British Protestant-that it would give privileges and immunities to the Catholic Church which are denied to the Churches of England and Scotland-is above all question. Yet liberality proclaims that it ought to be done-the "enlightened" part of your senators protest, that justice and right call for it, and that it would increase the security of your Church and Religion! It will soon, I think, be thought just and right, to