complaint. The Opposition grievance is that distress, particularly in the manufacturing districts, is intense, and that nothing has been done to relieve it; the counter-grievance of our Tory friends is, that so much has been done to relieve the labouring classes that agricultural produce has become too cheap. Then, the Tories complain that the Government looks with too much apathy on the imminent danger of Ireland-while the Whig countercomplaint is, that the ministers have been unconstitutionally active in discountenancing agitation and in providing measures for suppressing insurrection. It is clear that all these contradictory allegations cannot be true, and we think we shall be able to show that none of them have any solid foundation.

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In the first place, does any one believe that paroxysms mercial or agricultural distress can be prevented or alleviated by the application of statutes, like political poultices, hot and hot, to assuage local inflammation; or does any one doubt that sudden tamperings with such matters are certain to aggravate the disease? The Corn Law and Tariff of last year were organic measures, whose operations can only be tested by experience; and we do not suppose that any man, except an Anti-Corn-Law Leaguer, would have wished to have seen a new experiment on those great interests. As far as our materials for judgment extend, we find that the advantages anticipated from those measures are fully confirmed; bread and all other kinds of provisions have been lowered, and remain at moderate prices-exactly at the present moment those of 1835-and that without any decrease, but, on the contrary, with in some instances an increase of protection to the farmer. For instance, it will be seen by reference to the tables in our 70th vol. p. 522, that the importation of foreign wheat in the year 1839 was 2,702,848 quarters-and that the protection to the farmer in the shape of the net duties on that importation was 670,0547., or about 4s. 11d. the quarter-whereas in the last year, ending the 5th July, 1843, under the new Corn Bill, we find that the importation has been nearly the same, 2,695,281 quarters; while the protection in the shape of duty has been no less than 1,200,000, varying from Ss. to 20s. per quarter-and affording, on the average, double the former protection; and in the year 1841, the year immediately before the operation of the new law, on an importation of 2,393,061 quarters, the protection in the shape of duty had been only 3s. 5d. per quarter. It is true that the home prices have been lower in the present year, but that is the inevitable, and-whatever partial inconvenience it may operate-the happy result of a good harvest, and it is clear that they would have been still lower but for the additional protection afforded, when most needed, by the new

Corn

Corn Bill. The prices too are positively higher, and relatively much higher, than in 1833-4-5 and 6; and, let us add-no inconsiderable feature in this satisfactory retrospect-that upwards of 1,200,000l. have been paid into a very needy exchequer,

Let us now turn to the Tariff. Can we recollect without a smile what a bugbear the admission of live cattle was this time last year?-can we recollect without pity the panic of so many farmers who sacrificed their stock under the terror of foreign invasion? It is really worth while to preserve a record of the real effect of this formidable aggression on the agricultural interests.

An Account of Live Stock imported in each of the first Six Months of the Year 1843.

In addition to this account of live stock, let us see what salted provisions were imported in the same period :

:-

An Account of Foreign Salted Provisions imported in each of the first Six Months of 1843.

And we subjoin a comparative account of the whole importa

tion of salted provisions in the year 1841, before the tariff, and the year 1842;

Now is it possible, in the face of these accounts, to pretend that the tariff has done any serious injury, or indeed any at all, to the English or Irish agriculturist?

We therefore entreat our agricultural friends to consider this remarkable evidence as to the real effect of the most important and most litigated measures of last year, and to do the ministers -and us for our humble share in the defence of the ministersthe justice to recollect that these are exactly the results which they announced, and which we anticipated; namely, that the tariff might tend to regulate markets, and to lower prices to the poor consumer, without doing any essential injury to the home producer. We ask them, further, to apply this experience to the bugbears of the present year-Canadian flour and Nova Scotian wheat-which we are satisfied are about as formidable as the beef of Spain and the mutton of Belgium.

We are really at a loss to guess under what strange infatuation any portion of the agricultural interest-whether in the country or in the press-can consider the measures of the present cabinet as hostile to them, or suspect that it can now meditate any antiagricultural projects. Its political existence is interwoven with the principle of agricultural protection-there has not been, in our memory, any Cabinet so largely and so exclusively connected with the landed interest. We do not believe that there has ever been a First Lord of the Treasury and three Secretaries of State possessing so great a landed stake in the country, and possessing nothing else. If they are guided by public principle, their first engagement is to the landed interest-if they could be influenced by private considerations, their whole dependence must be on the landed interest; and it is by their position of great landed proprietors that they are enabled with the more confidence and a steadier hand to hold the balance between agriculture and manufactures to make apparent sacrifices of the interests with which they are personally connected, which they well know are speedily and fully compensated by the reaction which the prosperity of the consumer must inevitably have on the producer-and to disregard, in their enlarged views of the general welfare, the purblind alarms of ignorance, or the dishonest misrepresentations of faction.

But we are told that, in spite of corn bills and tariffs-in spite 2 r2

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of those endeavours to relieve, by equitable adjustments, both the agricultural and manufacturing interests, there is still great distress in both. We believe it-wherever there is a dense labouring population there must always be individual, and often general distress-wherever large classes depend on seasons and circumstances; or on extensive works of precarious yieldings and variable markets; or on the uncertain calls of luxury or of fashion; or wherever in the production of even the necessaries of life an active competition intervenes-wherever there are large capitals ready to be thrown into any speculation that offers a hope of profits, to the disturbance of those already in possession, for trade is a perfect Attila or Napoleon in its spirit of invasion—wherever, in short, any of those circumstances occur which are now, we are sorry to say, in permanent operation in every branch of British trade and manufacture, there will be distress-more or less intense -more or less general: but for such distress there is no cure in the art of governing, and scarcely indeed in the nature of things; for in most cases what produces relief in one quarter creates distress in another; it is a kind of tide, never absent, always at work, and ebbing in one place only because it is flowing in another.

But why then is it doomed, as if by an angry_Providence, that there should always be more distress under a Tory government than under the Whigs? So indeed, if we were to trust our ears only, the fact would seem to be; but if we appeal to our eyes, our memories, and our reason, we shall soon find that it is not that there is more distress under a Tory Ministry, but simply that we hear more of it. A Tory opposition never wishes to aggravate or exaggerate public distress; it never attempts to make a government responsible for seasons, fashions, and accidents; it never appeals to the passions of mobs. During the ten or a dozen years of Whig misrule, the fluctuating mass of distress, inseparable from our complicated system-of which one portion seems so frequently the antagonist of the other-existed, and sometimes with paroxysms as sharp, if not sharper, than any that had occurred during Tory administrations; but was the Duke of Wellington ever heard to charge Lord Melbourne with the responsibility of such calamities? Did Sir Robert Peel ever ask Lord John Russell for some ministerial remedy against the bankruptcy of master manufacturers and the consequent destitution of their dismissed hands? Did Sir Robert or his friends take advantage of every accident which might arise, to drive distress to disturbance, and suffering to sedition? But no sooner did he become Minister, first in 1834 and again in 1841, than the country was suddenly assailed with the cry of public misery—a misery which

indeed existed, but which-if Ministers were to be held responsible for it-must have been laid to the doors of his Whig predecessors, and not of him who, when this clamour of distress was raised, had as yet had time to do neither good nor harm.

These are not opinions advanced by us for the present time, nor fashioned for this particular occasion-they were stated fully and clearly at the very dawn of Sir Robert Peel's administration; and what we then said has been so completely verified by the event, and is besides of such deep and permanent importance, that we shall be forgiven if we repeat it here:-The country'we said in our number of this time two years-'must prepare itself for the essential difference which has always existed, and, from the nature of the antagonist principles, must exist, between a Tory and a Whig Opposition. A Tory Opposition is seldom, we might almost say never, aggressive: whenever and as long as the Ministers were satisfied to carry on the business of the country with even tolerable fairness, they were always secure of the assistance of the Tory Opposition. Very different, we anticipate, will be the conduct of the Whig and Radical Opposition, who will, we have little doubt, coalesce into the same violent and disorganising course, of which, even while their party was in office, they showed so many mutinous symptoms, and which they will probably now pursue with their characteristic intemperance and rancour.—Quart. Rev., vol. lxviii. p. 528.

And again :-' But no doubt we shall hear a great deal about universal distress and the destitution and misery of the lower orders, for which any Government can be held, by honest men, so little responsible, that, although this distress, destitution, and misery had attained an almost unprecedented height under the late Administration, neither we, nor we believe any other Conservative writer or speaker, ever thought of attributing it to the misgovernment of the Whigs. But Lord John Russell's imputations on the Tories, on account of former periods of distress, oblige us to record that the Whigs have Now handed over the country to Sir Robert Peel in this EXTREME STATE OF SUFFERING. We make it no subject of reproach, but we beg that the FACT may not be forgotten.' (Ib. p. 530.)

We claim no merit for prophecy, or even sagacity, in having made these remarks-they would naturally occur to any one who had paid the slightest attention to the conduct of all Whig Oppositions; and the last session has afforded, and we have no doubt the next session will afford, additional confirmation of their truth. But though Governments can never cure, and but seldom alleviate, the kind of distress we now speak of, it is very certain that both Governments and Oppositions may inflame and aggravate