at the beginning of the Revolution, and who experienced treatment from the sons of the Old Dominion upon which his grandson would not be likely to look back with pleasure, in his interesting and candid work on the United States, says, แ "If a practical statesman were required to point out two principal a priori tests of the permanent prosperity of a nation, I think he could scarcely select any preferable to those adduced; first, that every adult should be able to read and write; secondly, that every able bodied man, willing to work, should find employment at a rate of wages sufficient to ensure him the necessaries and conveniences of life. Both these propositions, allowing for the exceptions necessarily incident to any broad political statement, may be generally affirmed in respect to the United States. It is a fact no less surprizing than pleasing to record, that during two years spent in travelling through every part of the Union, I have only once been asked for alms, and that once was by a female who was very unwell, and who, although decently dressed, told me that she wanted a bit of money to buy some food."

At a public meeting held in Liverpool last fall, an English gentleman who had just returned from a tour through the United States, in contrasting the condition of the labouring classes in the two nations said "labourers in the West, who can do nothing but dig, earn a dollar and a half a day, and obtain board and lodgings for two dollars

and a half a week. Flour in New Orleans and Cincinatti is $3 and $4 a barrel, in Liverpool it is $10, and oftener higher." In speaking of Lowell, which had been in existence only fifteen years, and yet contained 25,000 inhabitants, and employed a capital of $10,000,000 in manufactures, he said, "When I saw the female operatives come from the factories, I could not distinguish them from well-dressed young ladies; their wages were from $1 50cts. to $2 50cts. clear of board and lodgings. This is not the state of things we find in our manufacturing towns. The first sight I saw on landing at Liverpool was a female picking up dung in the streets with which to buy taxed bread." A spectacle which presents itself to the stranger in every large town, and on all the great roads of the kingdom.

It is said (page 244) that along with a few wicked and unprincipled men, called Chartists, I set up a whine about adding to the national debt.' The same as to say, that none but Chartists object to an increase of the national debt. The great liberal party, he well knows, have always been opposed to it, and he will find but few men in the nation who do not consider it the great calamity of England. Even Sir Robert Peel thinks direct taxation, (seldom resorted to, except in time of war,) better than to augment the already enormous burden that presses upon the nation. And Blackwood's Magazine, certainly never charged with Radicalism, recommends that the head of

every Prime Minister who increases the debt, be made to roll upon the execution block. It says, "that debt is the great calamity of England; the great source of those perpetual discontents which show the distempered state of the frame; the secret of that strange and desperate poverty, which in one of the most fertile and lovely countries of the world, places the free peasant of England below the comforts of the foreign slave; the fount of those unquenched subterranean fires which burst up in Chartism and Socialism, and the hundred other wild and ominous threateners of general evil. To what conclusion this formidable future may come, baffles all conjecture. But to diminish the public debt of England should be the grand object of every man who deserves to govern the country; and to suffer its increase should be rewarded with the scaffold. It is substantial high treason to the empire!" My whine seems to chime in very harmoniously with the "whine" of the great organ of the Conservatives. It is something more than a "whine" from "a few Chartists" who happen to number at the present time THREE MILLION AND A QUARTER ON ONE PETITION TO PARLIAMENT. It is a growl

from this fourth part of the adult population of England. A very ominous growl!

If it were not too solemn a matter for burlesque, I should be tempted to indulge a moment of merriment over the grave assertion that all the people of England enjoy equal rights. It is too palpa

bly false to need refutation, and too sad a theme for ridicule. In various parts of my work will be found evidence which it will require something more potent than the assertion of an anonymous writer, or even his statistics to overthrow, that although the working classes pay a vast sum every year to support the government, yet this sum falls far short of the grand aggregate wrung from them to enrich the aristocracy! My statistics on this subject will illustrate the humanity of that class of men you would have us believe to be so vigilant of the rights and interests of the poor.

The remark is made by "Libertas," that I estimate the amount of grain consumed in Great Britain too high by 64,000,000 bushels per annum. Possibly; but it only places his "well-fed" "free," "happy," people, in a far worse condition than I supposed they were. He has said much of the comparative amount of bread consumed in Great Britain and the United States. Let us come to facts and figures.

"Sixty million quarters," (or 480,000,000 bushels) you say," is all the grain of all kinds which can be made into bread." This is the estimate of M'Culloch; he says, "the annual average consumption of the different kinds of grain in the United Kingdom, cannot be estimated at less than 44 million quarters, (or 352,000,000 bushels,) exclusive of seed," estimating the population of the United Kingdom at 27,000,000, and we have 137

bushels for every person. But if we deduct from this estimate, the amount consumed by animals, used in beer, spirits, and the various manufactures which Dr. Colquin supposes to be, and M'Culloch considers this an accurate calculation, it will leave less than eight bushels of grain for the average yearly consumption of each person.

A late number of Hunt's Commercial Magazine, which is perhaps as high authority as any other in the country, says that "by the returns of the United States Marshals, for taking the census in June 1840, it appears that over thirty eight bushels of bread stuffs for every inhabitant in the country were raised in 1839, in the United States after deducting all that is consumed by stock, manufactured, sown, and exported, it leaves over twenty bushels for every man woman and child in the union!" Is it possible that Englishmen have learned to subsist upon one third as much of the necessaries of life as Americans? They must have reduced the art of starvation to admirable perfection. And yet with these facts before him, he attempts to show that because there is as much or more butchers' meat consumed in London in proportion to the population as there was ninety years ago, therefore the people are all well fed. This is a kind of logic "Libertas" seems to be particularly fond of. One question will dissipate all the fog he has gathered around his argument, by a mass of statistics. Who eats all this meat? He well knows that vast