wholly lost to the nation—is now, with a population of 28,000,000, not able to raise in round numbers above £51,000,000 on an average of years by taxation, and is brought to the verge of ruin by the purchase of £33,000,000 worth of foreign grain in 1846 and 1847, and the expenditure of £35,000,000 in 1846, and £25,000,000 in the first six months of 1847 on domestic railways, every shilling of which last sum was spent at home, and puts in motion industry within the nation.

The next great change was made in the year 1821, when the reciprocity system was introduced by Mr Huskisson. This subject has acquired great importance now, from the avowed intention on the part of government, scarcely disguised in the opening speech of this session of Parliament, to follow up the labours of the committee which made such laborious inquiries last session, by a bill for the total abolition of the Navigation Laws. We shall not enlarge on this subject, the vastness and importance of which would require a separate paper. Suffice it to say, therefore, that here too, experience has decisively warned us of the pernicious tendency of the path on which we have entered, and of the truth of Adam Smith's remark, that "though

some of the regulations of this famous act may have proceeded from national animosity, they are all as wise as if dictated by the most deliberate wisdom. As defence is of much more importance than opulence, the act of Navigation is perhaps the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England."* It appears from the parliamentary tables compiled by Mr Porter, that, while the British tonnage with the Baltic powers had increased from 1801 to 1821, under the protective system, to a very considerable degree, theirs with us had declined during the same period; under the reciprocity system, our tonnage with them had on the whole decreased to a third of its former amount, while their shipping with us had, during the same period, quadrupled.† It further appears, from the same tables, that the great increase which has taken place during the same period, has arisen from the prodigious growth of our colonial trade, or increase of the countries with whom we had concluded no reciprocity treaties, but left them on the footing of the protection of the old Navigation Laws. And though the profits of shipping of all sorts have received a vast addition, from the enormous importations consequent upon Sir R. Peel's free-trade measures, yet the returns of these years prove that the greater part of this

SWEDEN.

NORWAY.

DENMARK.

PRUSSIA.

increase has accrued to foreign states and powers, which may at any time turn the maritime resources thus acquired against ourselves. Suffice it to say, as an example of this truth, that of the ships which, in 1846, imported four million nine hundred thousand quarters of corn into the British harbours, no less than three-fourths were foreign vessels, and only one-fourth British. Nevertheless, so insensible are political fanatics to the most decisive facts, when they militate against their favourite theories, that it is in the full knowledge of these facts that government are understood to be prepared to introduce, even in this session of parliament, a measure for the abolition, or at least the essential abrogation, of the Navigation Laws.

A

The third great change made during the last quarter of a century has been in the government of Ireland. Here, if any where, the liberal system has received its full development, and has had the fairest opportunity for displaying its unmixed blessings. The Catholic disabilities, which we had been told for thirty years were the main cause of its distressed condition, were repealed in 1829. large measure of parliamentary reform-larger than the most vehement Irish patriots ventured to dream of was conceded in 1832. Corporate reform succeeded in 1834; the Protestant corporations were dispossessed of power; the entire management of all the boroughs of the kingdom was put into the hands of the Romish multitude; and a large portion of the county magistracy were, by the appointment of successive liberal Lords Chancellor, drawn from the better part of those of the same religious persuasion. The Protestant clergy were deprived of a fourth of their incomes to appease the Romish Cerberus; and, to avoid the vexation of collecting tithes from persons of a different religious belief, they were laid directly as a burden on the land; Maynooth was supported by annual grants from government; the system of national education was modified so as to please the Roman Catholic clergy. Monster meetings, where sedition was always, treason often, spoken, headed by O'Connell, were allowed to go on, without the slightest

opposition, for two years; and when at length the evil had risen to such a height that it could no longer be endured, the leading agitator, after being convicted in Ireland, was liberated, in opposition to the opinion of a great majority of the twelve judges, by the casting-vote in the House of Peers of a Whig law-Lord. British liberality, when the season of distress came, was extended to the famishing Irish with unheard-of munificence; and while the Highlanders, who suffered equally under the potato failure, got nothing but from the never-failing kindness of British charity, Ireland, besides its full share of that charity, received a national grant of TEN MILLIONS STERLING, of which no less than eight millions were borrowed by Great Britain.

Has

What have been the results? crime decreased, and industry improved, and civilisation advanced, under the liberal system? Has attachment to the British government become universal, and hatred of the stranger worn out, in consequence of the leniency with which they have been treated, and the unparalleled generosity with which their wants have been supplied? The facts are notoriously and painfully the reverse. Hatred of the Saxon was never so general or so vehement; idleness and recklessness were never so widespread; destitution was never so universal; life and property was never so insecure,-as after this long system of concession, and these unparalleled acts of private and public generosity. The Irish Repealers declare, that though Ireland, like England, has been blessed with an uncommonly fine harvest, there are four millions of persons in that country in a state of hopeless misery; and supposing, as is probably the case, that this statement is exaggerated, the authentic reports to Parliament on the state of the poor prove that there are above two millions of paupers, or a full fourth of the population, in a state verging on starvation. A new so-called Coercion Bill has been brought into Parliament in consequence of the great increase of crimes of violence, and, above all, of cold-blooded murders; and on the necessity that existed for its introduction the present Secretary

not hesitate to say they are unparalleled in the annals, extensive as they are, of human folly and perversity. Only think what they were!

We first, in 1807, abolished the slave trade in our dominions. So far there can be no doubt that the step taken was both just and expedientjust, because the iniquitous traffic in human flesh should, at all hazards, be stopped in a Christian state; expedient, because we already possessed, in the colonies themselves, a large negro population, perfectly capable, if well treated, of keeping up and increasing their own numbers, and performing all the field operations requisite for the cultivation of produce, which at that period employed two hundred and fifty thousand tons of British shipping for its transport, and maintained a population that consumed £3,500,000 worth of British manufactures. But as the British colonies were thus deprived of the aid of imported forced labour, which the rival sugar colonies of Cuba and the Brazils enjoyed, of course it was indispensable that the labour of the black cultivators in the British islands should be perpetuated, and the proprietors maintained in the means of getting that work from them which they were prohibited from acquiring from foreign labourers. The way to do this, and withal to give the greatest possible security and means of improvement to the black population of which they were susceptible, was evident, andwas clearly and forcibly pointed out at the time. It was to maintain slavery in the meantime, doing every thing possible to mitigate its severity, till the negro population had come so much under the influence of artificial wants as to be ready, for their enjoyment, to submit to regular and continuous toil; to regulate their days of forced labour, and give them some days in the week to work for themselves, of which they might reap the fruits; and to allow every negro, who could thus amass a sum equal to his price, to purchase his freedom from his master. By this simple system, no one could become free without having proved himself fit to be a freeman, and therefore the whole evils of premature emancipation were avoided. It was thus that slavery wore out

almost without being noticed in the European kingdoms; it was thus it almost disappeared, insensibly and without a convulsion, in Spanish South America.

Instead of this wise, judicious, and really humane course, what have we done? Why, we first, by the act of 1834, abolished slavery altogether in the British dominions, upon giving a compensation to the proprietors, which, large as it was, was not, on an average, the fourth part of the value of the slave population set free, at the expiration of a prospective apprenticeship of seven years; and at the end of four years, deeming that first time too long, we set them free altogether! We thought, in our wisdom, that a nation required no longer time to serve the apprenticeship to freedom than a freeman did to become expert in a trade. We proposed to do in a few years what nature could only accomplish in centuries. The consequences, so often and so fatally predicted, immediately ensued, The emancipated black population either refused to work, or did so at such high wages, and in so desultory a manner, that the supply of sugar rapidly declined in the British islands. It, in consequence, rose considerably in price in the mother country; and upon that, partly under the influence of the free trade mania, partly from a desire to appease the clamorous multitude in the British towns, who had begun to feel, in the enhanced price of that article, the inevitable consequences of their own actions, we did a thing so unjust, so monstrous, so cruel, so inconsistent with all our former professions, that we believe the annals of the world may be searched in vain for its parallel. It was this:

We first reduced to a half of its former amount the protective duty on foreign slave grown sugar, and then, by the act of 1846, in pursuance of Sir R. Peel's principles, and with his approbation, passed an act for the progressive reduction, during three years, of the duties on foreign sugar, until, in 1849,,those on foreign and colonial were to become equal to each other! That is, having first deprived our own colonies of their slave labour for less than a fourth of its value, we proceeded to

admit foreign sugar RAISED BY SLAVES to the supply of the British markets, on terms which in two years will be those of perfect equality. We have seen what came of the attempt in the Mauritius, to compete with slave-labour by means of the labour of freemen. Even though the attempt was made under the most favourable auspices, with the colossal capital of Reid, Irving, and Company, and an ample supply of hill coolies to carry it on, the immense wealth of that house was swallowed up in the hopeless attempt, and it became bankrupt in consequence. Experience had long ago proved in St Domingo that the black population, when not compelled, will not raise sugar; for that noble island, which, anterior to the emancipation of its slaves by the Constituent Assembly of France, raised and exported 672,000,000 pounds of sugar, now does not export a single pound; and instead of consuming as then £9,890,000 worth of French manufactures, does not import a single article.* To provide against this evidently approaching crisis in the supply of sugar for the British market, we have thrown open our harbours to slave-grown sugar from every quarter of the globe; and from

the rapid decline in the produce of the West Indian islands, even before this last coup-de-grace was given them by the application of free trade principles to their produce, it is painfully evident that a result precisely similar is about to take place in the British colonies. And it is little consolation to find that this injustice has recoiled upon the heads of the nation which perpetrated it, and that the decline in the consumption of British manufactures by the West India islands is becoming proportioned to the ruin we have inflicted on them.‡

But most of all has this concatenation of fanaticism, infatuation, and injustice proved pernicious to the negro race, for whose benefit the changes were all undertaken. Happy would it have been for them if the British slave trade had never been abolished; that they had crossed the Atlantic chiefly in Liverpool or Glasgow slave-ships, and been brought to the British West India islands! For then the slave trade was subject to our direction, and regulations might have been adopted to place it on the best possible footing for its unhappy victims. But now we have thrown it entirely into the hands of the Spaniards and Portuguese, over whom we

£3,852,624

3,588,903

3,192,637

2,791,478

1,213,284

666