and applicable coloring from surrounding circumstances. I will not now enter into a controversy upon the assumed improvements in the doctrine of rent: it would be a squabble about words. I admit the accuracy of the received definition, that rent is the difference between the return made to the more productive portions, and that which is made to the least productive portions, of capital, employed upon the land; that that difference is determined by the fertility of the soil, and that it is regulated altogether by the cost of growing it on that land which pays no rent. The last proposition is the vaunted improvement or discovery of you and Mr. Malthus, and your disciples. I will not now gainsay it, but merely notice an inference adduced from it by one of your pupils expressly contradictory to your own declared opinions, and illustrative of my preliminary observation. It is, that a tax on rent, therefore, can have no effect on the price of corn; it cannot operate as a discouragement to its production, and, by consequence, needs not be accompanied by a counteracting duty; all which logical inferences from your improved doctrine of rent, are distinctly denied and disproved by you and Mr. Malthus, its logical promulgators. The immediate cause and proportion then of rent is the excess of price above the cost of production. That excess is consequent upon, first and mainly, that fertile quality of the soil, by which it is enabled to yield a greater portion of the necessaries of life,---a support of labor, than was consumed in its cultivation; and, secondly, that quality peculiar to its produce—a necessary of life; of being able when properly distributed, to create its own demand*; that is, to generate a quantity of consumers in proportion to its supply. According to the rate of the first and chief cause of excess of price over cost of production; that is, according to the relative fertility of the soil, will be the amount and proportion of rent. Where the whole land in cultivation is fertile, there will be little or no rent, but that of advantageousness of situation. Where there is a variety in the fertility of the soil in cultivation, there will be a variable scale of rents. The different rates of fertility have been happily likened by Mr. Malthus to machines of different power, with the most important and characteristic difference of employment: that, whereas, in manufactures every successive machine employed in their production tends more and more to diminish their cost (the quantity of capital and labor expended in their production) every successive machine employed in the production of corn, tends to raise its cost; that is, to augment the expenditure of capital and labor necessary to its production. These successive machines, or differently fertile soils, are only employed according as the consumers exceed in proportion the quantity grown for them on the best soils (or first machines); and nobody will of course resort to an inferior machine or less fertile soil, unless the demand is such; that is, unless the prosperous cir This fact shows that cheap corn, if obtained easily (as its advocates contend), would effect its own cure by adding to the population. This effect to them must be terrific, if they knew it. But more of this anon. It is taken for granted in this (and the subsequent) dialogue, that the reader is not totally unread in economical science. cumstances of the (State, or) consumers are such as not only to remunerate the outlayer of capital and labor on the best soils, but also to afford a profitable return for the additional outlay and capital expended on the less fertile soils. Now the employer of the best machines would have a great and unfair advantage (a monopoly of the worst species) over the worker of inferior machines, unless the owner of both, the landlord, charged the former in proportion to this advantage, or fertility of soil, so as to put him upon an equitable footing with the latter. This compensating charge is rent, and it matters nothing to the argument whether, as I maintained in the Wealth of Nations, the use of the most inferior machine in the raising of raw produce from the soil pays any thing to the owner of the machine for its use, or, as you contend, the cultivator of the poorest soil in cultivation pays nothing. You may say I am repeating undeniable truisms. I am, but mark the consequences. Smattering lecturers at the Mechanics' Institute have charged the apparent inconveniences consequent upon this variable fertility of the soil, upon the owners and cultivators of that soil, forgetting, or ignorant, that that variable fertility is not the work of man, but the gift of nature; they have denounced the rent of the landlord as an unjust monopoly, forgetting, or ignorant, that that rent is the necessary and only check upon a most unjust monopoly; and that, in its nature, it is contradistinguished to commercial monopoly, from being defined and limited by the fertility of the soil last taken into calculation; and they have condemned the taking into use the inferior machines, forgetting, or ignorant, that the very necessity of the cultivation of less fertile soils, is the necessary consequence and index of a prosperously increasing population, of an improving condition of society. The truth and most pregnant consequences of these principles will appear evident to the most flippant repeater of both our names, when I shall come to apply them to the Corn Laws. Sufficient now if it appears, that the rent of land is but a partial monopoly, and that it is the consequence, not the cause, of a high price of our produce; that is, of the diminished return to the capital and labor expended in the production of that produce; that is, of the necessity of having recourse to inferior soils for the growth of corn, and that rent is, in the words of Mr. Malthus, a clear indication of a most inestimable quality in the soil, which God has bestowed on man, the quality of being able to maintain more persons than are necessary to work it. Mr. Ricardo. I subscribe to all principles, and to most of your inferences. I will explain the grounds of my dissent, when we are actually engaged in the discussion of the politics of the Corn Laws. But what about the currency? your countryman, Joseph Hume, says it has nothing whatever to say to the Corn Laws. A. Smith. Hume knows nothing about either. Let him keep to his pence-table, or read the clever pamphlet, not always right, of my other countryman, Sir James Grahame of Netherby. In what I have laid down, my object was to make it appear, that a high price of corn precedes, and does not follow, high rent; that it is the cause, and not the consequence, and that it is the index of a thriving condition of the other interests of the state. I mean now briefly to show, that a high price of corn is the necessary consequent of the quantity and quality of the currency that a National Debt occasions, leaving out of account, the burdens of peculiar taxation that you have alluded to, and which you have admitted, require an "adequate "protection." The principle, more clearly laid down by Mr. Locke, than any man since his time, is briefly this---(I need not explain, to you, the effect of a war and high taxation in augmenting the paper ratio of the currency.) The property, (the trade in its widest sense,) of a country, requires for its circulation a certain amount or stream of currency--the representation of value of which, it is evident, will be as its proportion to the quantity of the property it circulates. Now a National Debt swells this stream of currency in two ways. In the first, by the necessary tendency of all taxation, to convert dormant wealth into active capital or transitive property; and in the next, by the manner (which no man more perfectly understands than you) in which the government bills, or acknowledgement of their debt, add to the paper currency, thereby affecting the value of the precious metals. I shall say more on these points when discussing with you all, and our friend Mr. Horner, the Currency Acts, since his Bullion Report was submitted to the House of Commons. For the present, taking the market average price of gold as a general index of the value (or amount) of the currency, I contend, that 60s. per quarter for wheat, in 1804, (with mere reference to the amount of the circulating representatives of property) was as high a price for corn as 107s. in 1813, or 75s. in 1816, or 94s. in 1817, or 72s. in 1819, and so on; as the following crude table will show. 1819....844,962,321 ......24,697,407...... 81. 6.... 72 The slight discrepancies in this document are explained by the state of the crops, and the abrupt tampering with the country paper currency. They are sufficient for my present purpose of showing the connection of the Currency and the Corn Laws. Mr. Ricardo. I always admitted it, and am now ready to apply your principles to Mr. Canning's resolutions. THE RECLUSE. ""Tis ten long years since last I heard this strain, Say Forester, how past such lapse of time, "Stranger! ambition has not marr'd my peace, Nor anxious genius prompted thoughts of fame; Content I've walk'd the woods, nor wish increase Of worldly store,---my wealth an honest name. Thrills cheerfully with me her untaught lay, "Sing on, glad forester,---oh would that I With thee had sojourn'd, 'neath the mountain side, Then had been spar'd me many a galling sigh, Wrung from my heart by sense of wounded pride.” B. C. THE BANDIT. Beside a stream, and 'neath a shade repos'd, High curv'd his arching brow, his eyes were clos'd He of the blood-stain'd hand, unknown to spare--- Fancy seem'd ranging 'midst the scenes of youth, (That dear abode of innocence and truth) Or sought by lawless enterprise to live, Happy with all his humble home could give, His heart embued with tenderness and truth; To scenes of rapine, and to bloodshed wake; And thrice the bugle sounded a command: B. C. The following lines are extracted from " The Sunday Monitor," in which they were said to be the production of a young lady scarcely thirteen years old. LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. "Love is like the shadow seen," "Where the sun first lights the skies- "But dwindling as each moment flies. ADDRESS TO MY INFANT BROTHER. 64 6 Ope, ope, thy cherub eye, and make "O sweet is that fond smile, my boy, "And dear is that quick touch of joy,' "That lifts thy pretty hands; "Then clasp them round thy mother's breast, E. H. E. H. We do not want to frighten the friends or parents of this young lady, but we never look upon precocious talent without a feeling of melancholy. One of two fates is sure to wait on youthful genius---early death, or the outliving of their celebrity. The latter has been exemplified in many recent and notorious instances. An illustration of the former, has been lately exemplified in the case of the young Luder, son of a teacher of music at Gottingen, whom destiny spared from the misery of surviving his reputation. In his seventh year he was able to play the most difficult sonatas of Hummel; in his eighth, he composed variations and trifling pieces; and in his tenth---he died! MASSILLON AND HIS CRITIC. "The Petit Carême of Massillon was always thought too favorable to the rights of the people. A remark which has been made on his panegyric of Lewis XIV. will, we think, make our readers smile. When the funeral service for Lewis XIV. was performed, the church was hung in black, a magnificent mausoleum was raised over the bier, the edifice was filled with trophies and other memorials of the monarch's past glories; day-light was excluded, but innumerable tapers supplied its place, and the ceremony was attended by the most illustrious personages of the realm. Massillon ascended the pulpit, contemplated in silence, during some time, the scene in view, then raised his arms to heaven, looked down, and slowly said in a solemn and subdued tone, Mes freres! Dieu seul est grand.' God only is great!---With one impulse, all the auditory rose from their seats, and reverently bowed to the altar.---On these words of Massillon, a French critic, with an exuberance of loyalty, thus indignantly observes,--- Comme si les Bourbons n'etaient pas 'grands! As if the Bourbons too were not great!' CARDINAL DE RETZ. “Patris dictum sapiens temeritas filii comprobavit,---is a sentence produced by Cicero, to shew the great effect of a skilful arrangement of words. On one occasion, Cardinal de Retz shewed, in a very extraordinary manner, the happy effect of such an arrangement. A debate took place in the parliament of Paris, upon a point which the Cardinal was very |