duce the three-fourths to one-half, and assume that an export to the amount of a million would yield half a million for wages, and employ 20,000 people, at, on the average, 10s. per week each. We will further assume, that these people would have 10,000 small children, sick relatives, &c. dependent on them. If you have 30,000 idle souls, they cannot cost you, in parish relief, gifts, bad debts, loss of rent, and thefts, much less than halfa-crown per week each, or nearly L.200,000 annually. If, by a bounty of twenty per cent you can employ them as we have described, in export ing silks to the value of a million yearly, the bounty will be L.200,000. In this case, you will only pay in bounty what you must otherwise pay in poor rates, &c., and you will make foreign nations pay to these 30,000 souls L.300,000 annually: in addition, you will rid yourselves of many more paupers, by indirectly giving them employment; and a large part of the L.300,000 paid by foreigners will flow into your exchequer. You will thus not only give to this part of your population abundance for want, but, by an apparent expenditure of L.200,000, you will, in reality, rid yourselves of one of nearly this amount. The bounty will be not an expense, but a saving.

Your sneers will be no refutation. You may thus manifestly, not only give to your Silk Trade good profits and wages, but enlarge it very greatly.

Then place before you your linen trade. Give it the monopoly of your colonial market from which your folly has in a great measure banished it, and restore as far as may be necessary its bounties. You may thus demonstrably give to this trade good profits and wages, and likewise great extension.

Then act in like manner to your manufacturers of gloves, lace, shoes, paper, &c. &c. Give them a monopoly, not only of your home market, but of your colonial one; and use all due means for enabling them to export. You may thus evidently give them good profits and wages, and great enlargement.

- Raise your protecting duties to all your smaller manufactures and trades, which are bound by them to bad prices. Your smaller manufactures and trades can, in general, preserve to themselves good profits and wages, if they

be protected from foreign competitors. They are carried on principally by labour; they cannot, from their nature, accumulate unwieldy stocks; and the workmen employed in them, from the comparatively small number engaged in each, can keep up their wages. They are far less subject to ruinous fluctuations than the large ones, and when they endure suffering, the large ones are, to a great extent, the parents of it. Collectively, they are of infinitely more value than both the cotton and woollen manufactures. The more you make the public weal depend on them and agriculture, the less frequent and severe your periods of public suffering will be; and the more you make it depend on the cotton and woollen manufactures, the more numerous and intolerable will be these periods. You ought to make the prosperity of the empire as little dependent as possible on great, ungovernable manufactures; and more especially on the cotton one, which, from the peculiar character of its powers of production and markets, can never enjoy more than momentary fits of prosperity. Woe to you, when the fortunes and bread of your popu lation shall hang on the cotton trade!

And then let your country banks again circulate their small notes. Once more, let us have none of your senseless generalities and prejudices. You declared that these notes caused trade to be visited with a fit of distress every two or three years; and now your Ministers declare that, without them, trade, from its nature, must be so visited! In the teeth of your assertions, that after their suppression prices would be lower, most leading articles have already become dearer! The doctrine that these notes could make corn, wool, silks, the freights of ships, &c. &c. higher, while your trading and navigation laws remain what they are, is too absurd to fall from any lips save those of aged females; leave it to them, and utter something more worthy of man's understanding. It is greatly to be deplored that the advocates of small notes have taken their ground so strongly on their effect on prices. The great mischief of the suppression is to be found in this-it has permanently destroyed an enormous portion of the trading capital of the middle classes, and the employment of labour. Re store the notes, and it will give comfortable trade and employment to vast

numbers. Let us here have none of your ignorant prejudices: these men, with the few hundreds they obtain from the banks, cannot glut your market; this is done by your overgrown capitalists and their machinery.

Let us now turn to the subsidiary measures we mentioned when speaking of agriculture. Ireland supplicates you to use her as a mine of wealth; and must she supplicate in vain? By your love of money, we entreat you to seize the profusion of riches she offers you! Having given her good prices for her produce, in the next place give her good wages, by removing her redundancy of population. Let a Board of Agriculture be formed to make roads and canals, and to bring her waste lands into culture, by renting them on lease, or lending money to their owners. If this will not work with sufficient rapidity, aid it by emigration on an extensive scale. Then establish your English system of poor laws, stripped of the practice of administering relief to the fully employed labourer. A system for merely supporting the aged and impotent, will be of no worth to the body of the people. Abolish all vicious systems of land letting, and compel the landowners to reside a part of the year on their estates, and do their duty. Encourage the fisheries by bounty and other means. Establish a balance of Protestants throughout the island, and make the government do its duty, in repressing disorder, and cherishing right principles. All this will make Ireland a land of good profits and wages; it will make your seven millions of Irish subjects prosperous.

Now for your generalities and prejudices. In the first place, the landowners will gain sufficient from the increased price of corn, &c., to counterpoise any loss in poor-rates; this may silence them. But the culture of the waste lands, &c. will require money. Well, have you none? Your money market is distressed with excess, and it implores you to borrow as many millions as you please. But the state of the revenue-what! you, who could throw away twenty or thirty millions in a single year in carrying on war, unable now to expend four or five millions in giving permanent prosperity to seven millions of your popu lation! Shake off this miserable infaVOL. XXVI. NO. CLIV.

tuation! If your expenditure for one year be sixty instead of fifty-five millions, and if a quarter of a million be added to your constant expenditure, you will never feel it. Granting that you expend in this manner five, or even ten millions, and it be expended fruitlessly, it will not disgrace you; the money will be lost in a noble speculation.

But, however, let us, like wise and calculating men, look well at the chances. Having done all this for Ireland, subject it to the taxes and duties which England is subject to. The people will be rendered great consumers of merchandise and manufactures. It may be regarded as morally certain, that the increased consumption and taxation will throw some millions annually into your Exchequer. Expend five or ten millions in this manner, and the next twenty years will, in one way or another, return you for it one hundred millions.

Now, we have the same doctrine that emigration, &c. will be useless, because the vacuum caused by them will soon be filled again. These measures will remove not only redundancy of population, but its great causes; and they will provide employment for future increase. Emigration, if necessary, is to be resorted to, not continually, but for once, in order to put society into the form requisite for rendering it afterwards unnecessary. Experience proves that if the Irish people cannot be provided with work at home, they will emigrate, to the prodigious injury of England and Scotland. More we need not say.

Be not misled by erroneous counsel. You are told that Ireland needs only capital to gain flourishing manufac tures. Why have her manufactures been in a great measure destroyed since the Union took being? Why is her linen trade declining so greatly at this moment? When Irish manufactures cannot compete with British ones, it is idle to say that capital will make them flourish. Do not be so foolish as to attempt to force in Ireland manufactures to her own injury, as well as yours; you have at present an excess of cotton manufacture. When we look at the condition of your own cotton and woollen weavers, we think you would benefit her inhabitants but little, by making such wea

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In the next place, put your Colonial wood-cutters into good circumstances, by lowering greatly your duties on their timber. This, of course, will yield large benefit to your Shipping İnterest.

Then encourage your Colonial fisheries to the utmost by bounty, &c. Here again we have your foolish generalities against bounty. The fisheries of foreign nations are, by means of it, flourishing, and ruining your own; you see the physical proof in them, that it employs the idle, gives extension to trade, and cannot therefore be lost money; yet you cannot be contaminated with it because its name is bounty! Rather than expend a few thousands in bounty, you will lose your fisheries, and have your population reduced to idleness and indigence. Oh, nation of unerring calculators, and profound sages! Bounty on fish rears you seamen, gives freight to your ships, enlarges general trade, employs additional inhabitants, and compels foreign nations to contribute to the maintenance of your population. Foreign nations, in buying your fish, practically buy of you boats and fish ing-tackle, ships and cordage, and taxed commodities of various kinds; and likewise contribute to your poor-rates. Bounty thus gives you far more on the one hand, than it takes away on the other.

Lower your duty on Colonial tobacco sufficiently to stimulate its production. Let your government establish in your various foreign possessions its experimental vineyards, plantations of cotton, tobacco grounds, &c. &c., in order to introduce amidst the inhabitants the best modes of culture and preparation for market.

With regard to your Sugar Colonies, settle the slave question in such a manner as the planters will sanction. The duty on sugar is nearly threepence per lb.; reduce it-we will point out a substitute for it before we conclude-to a penny. Reduce the duty on coffee.

All this would demonstrably add largely to the profits of your Colonial population, and give it an enormous increase of trade.

Let us now look at your Mercantile Interest. Your merchants, whether they buy and sell on their own account, or act as brokers, are practically agents who only do business for others at a per centage. Low, glut

prices are highly injurious to them, and they suffer comparatively as much from free trade as any part of the community whatever. Very many of them are deeply interested in the prosperity of the Colonies. As a whole, they would profit greatly from what we have recommended.

Your Monied Interest would profit very greatly from the same sources.*** The prosperity of many of your large towns depends principally on the prosperity of your agriculturists, merchants, and shipowners.

Let us now pause, and add these items of prosperity into a total. These measures would give general good profits and wages, and in consequence general prosperity to more than twothirds of your home population, and the great mass of your colonial one. You may rail as you please against monopolies and bounties, and quote to your heart's content the puerile fiction that a nation ought to buy where it can buy the cheapest; but you cannot refute it. If you tell us it is contrary to political economy, our reply is, its truth is placed above doubt by arithmetic. If this do not satisfy you, we add, its truth is placed above doubt by experiment; the war, when your advantages were far less than they are at present, forced you, in effect or otherwise, to adopt many of these measures, and by this it forced you into the enjoyment of unexampled trade, wealth, and prosperity. You made your stu pendous advances during the war, through the very things which the economists tell you are certain sources of national ruin; and if you do not see it, your blindness is intentional, or it is the effect of some supernatural visitation. The grand principle of genuine political economy is-National wealth and prosperity flow from the good profits or wages of the individual; therefore give these to the greatest number. That of the savage counterfeit you follow, is in reality-National wealth and prosperity flow from the bad profits or wages of the individual; therefore give loss and hunger to the greatest number. Could any thing be conceived more preposterous, than to attempt to produce general wealth and prosperity by making every business a losing and starving one? and yet this is precisely what you are doing.

Let us now proceed to the smallest number-the exporting manufacturers; and look, in the first place, at your

generalities and dogmas against dear labour and food. If you still believe in the exploded error, that the price of food governs the price of labour; enquire in the cotton, woollen, and silk trades-in every market for labourand you will soon discover that wages are governed by very different matters. As to dear food, let us put your generalities under our feet, and resort to that unerring teacher, Arithmetic. We will assume that what we recommend would make wheat 15s. per quarter dearer, than your economists wish it to be. It is estimated that each individual consumes a quarter of wheat annually, and of course it would impose on him an additional yearly cost of 15s. We will suppose that it would make animal food twopence per pound dearer; and that each individual, on the average, consumes a quarter of a pound daily; this would impose on him an additional yearly cost of about 15s. more. We will add 10s. for other matters; and now it appears arithme tically certain, that prices which would make the agriculturists wealthy and prosperous, would only make the food of the manufacturing labourer about two pounds per annum, or ninepence per week, dearer to him.

Abhorring generalities, we must look at your manufacturing labourers in de tail. The great mass of them, as you well know, are so far from consuming a quarter of wheat per year, and a quarter of a pound of meat per day, each, that they consume very little of either. They subsist chiefly on potatoes, butcher's offal, soups, &c.-on food which would be very little raised to them. Assuming, however, that they consume half the quantity, the food of each would be made about one pound per annum, or fourpence halfpenny per week, dearer. Very many of these labourers are single, and many of the married ones are practically single in regard to this matter, for husband, wife, and children, are employed. Great numbers of them have their yearly deficiencies made good from the poor-rates.

The better paid manufacturing labourers earn what would be good wages if their food were raised to this

extent.

The manufacturing labourers are paid by the piece, and their bad wages arise, in part, from their inability to procure constant employment. The

man who with full work can earn twelve or fourteen shillings per week, is frequently on short time, or wholly idle, and in consequence his yearly earnings do not amount to more than seven or eight shillings per week on the average. Nothing can be more shamefully unjust than the statements which are frequently made in Parliament:-Oh! it is asserted, these men can earn 30, 20, or 15 shillings per week. The fact is, that such men might earn something approaching to these sums by labouring sixteen hours per day, but they cannot get work to enable them to do so. Manufactures, from their nature, are flat some months in the year, and then the hands employed in them are only partially employed.

If the increased prosperity of the agriculturists, &c. should keep these labourers more fully employed, it would, in the year, put more into their pockets than would cover the advance in the price of their food. It would do this, if, by enabling them to work full hours and escape total idleness, it should give them two, three, or four weeks more of employment in the year. You must admit that it would have such effect.

But what is the very low rate of wages in the cotton and woollen trades really owing to? Is it because labour enters so largely into the price of goods? No: in many cases, a fraction of a farthing, a farthing, a halfpenny, or a penny per yard, makes the difference to the workman between famine wages and good ones: the masters sell some eight shillings' worth of goods for twopence less; they take the twopence wholly from the weaver's wages, and thereby reduce them one-third or onefourth; and thus the consumer gains twopence on eight shillings through the weaver's starvation. Frequently the benefit goes into the pocket of the shopkeeper, and never reaches the consumer. In the cotton trade wages are bad in some divisions, because they are exorbitant in others. The weavers can only earn six shillings or ten shillings per week,-the spinners earn eighteen shillings or twenty-five shillings,-and the printers from twenty shillings to fifty shillings; if these wages were equalized according to skill, the masters could sell at the same price, and the workmen would all be reasonably well paid. Why does this