since 1689, (when the government owed but £664, 263) accumulated upon herself the enormous debt of £792,306,442, for the payment of the interest of which a sum no less than £29,461,527, is drawn from the people every year. Yes every twenty-four hours nearly half a million dollars are wrung from a single nation to pay for the past extravagance of its rulers. Of this mighty aggregate, three thousand millions of dollars were expended in a single war with their old enemies the French! Well knowing it was impossible by direct or indirect taxation to raise the immense sums they demanded in the prosecution of these wars of ambition and plunder, the men who controlled affairs during the reigns of William and Mary, Queen Anne, George I, II, and III, craftily flattered each their own generation, that these wars were necessary for the public safety, and that it was too much for those periods to pay for their own defence. They not only appropriated all those times could furnish, but stretched out their hands and thrust them into the pockets of unborn generations, and compelled the unbegotten to provide not only for their own time when it should arrive, but for the extravagance of their ancestors.

Thus these wily politicians at the clearing up of the storm of Europe, after the battle of Waterloo, had mortgaged England in an account current with herself, for civil and military purposes, with a debt whose annual interest brings a tax of

nearly six dollars a year upon every man, woman, and child in the three kingdoms.

Before I have done with this great subject, it will be apparent to the reader, that every piece of bread the hand-loom weaver or the orphan child eats, is charged with a part of the expense of the victorious campaigns of Ramillies and Blenheim, by the Duke of Marlborough-of the castle voted him by Parliament-of the palace and estate voted the Duke of Wellington-of every pension given to the favourites of ministers; and a part of the price paid by England for maintaining that vast army, which for a quarter of a century measured swords on the fields of Europe with the son of the public notary of Ajaccio,—for to pay the interest on this debt thus contracted, heavier taxes are laid upon the labour of the working man of Great Britain than were ever laid upon the working man of any other nation of ancient or modern times.

But even this sum, vast as it is, sinks into insignificance, when compared with that great amount of direct and indirect taxation which weighs down the people of England. Besides the interest on the national debt ($150,000,000) there is expended every year over one hundred millions of dollars, making the sum annually raised to administer the government, two hundred and fifty millions of dollars. This is the first great division of English burdens I shall notice. It is raised in the most adroit, but after all, in the most oppres

sive manner, that the ingenuity of man could devise. The people are not approached directly— neither do the laws seem to take this sum from the labouring classes: but it is one of the plainest principles of true political economy that the burdens of every nation fall upon the working classes; that wherever the tax is laid, it will in the end come out of the toil and sweat of the labouring

man.

It will be no difficult matter to show, that the protective policy of England, has long been carried to an extent oppressive to the people and injurious to the government; that the manufacturing and commercial interests of the nation have already suffered from it most severely; and that unless many of the restrictions placed upon commerce be speedily removed, the day is already past from which England will hereafter date the decline of her commercial strength.

In our inquiries it will not be so much a question of politics as of humanity. So long as English warehouses are filled with manufactured goods, and the markets of the world are already glutted with them, it would matter little that half the manufactures of Great Britain were for the time broken down by the present commercial embarrassment of the nation, if this prostration was not so severely felt by the great multitude who are dependent upon their labour for daily bread. But when the suspension of a factory, involves the hunger and destitution of the operatives who

are turned away, we think less of the capitalist who leaves his business to collect his bills, and then goes to his country-seat, or up to London, to luxuriate upon his already ample fortune, until the times become better than we do of the gloomy crowds of operatives he has left behind him to starve.

The question often arises in this country, why it is that in a nation of such abounding resources and opulence, millions should suffer for the necessaries of life. Unless the world were so slow to learn wisdom, it would be too late in the day to attempt to prove what must be self-evident to every man who will think for himself, that either folly or injustice must characterize the government of a nation possessed of England's wealth and power, when such vast numbers of her people, strong, able-bodied, willing to labour, are suffering the pains of hunger. I do not pretend to say that it is possible for any government to prevent the recurrence of seasons of commercial and agricultural embarrassment; these crises will occur under the wisest administration; for they often depend upon causes beyond the reach of legislation. But I do say, that in a nation where so large a portion of the labouring class perpetually suffer for want of the necessaries of life, a great wrong must exist somewhere; and that the entire economy of the British government has a direct and positive tendency to impoverish the working man, and reduce him and his family at last to

starvation. Even such acknowledgments are sometimes forced from the aristocracy themselves. Says the Quarterly Review, (No. 29,) “In the road that the English labourer must travel, the poor-house is the last stage on the way to the grave." And in glancing at the alarming aspect which every where meets the eye of an observing Englishman, the same Review says, all this "is chiefly owing to a radical defect in the constitution of the British government."

A brief review of the principal items of the crushing system of taxation to which the British people have long been subjected, will make it cease to be a matter of astonishment that such appalling misery prevails over the British islands.

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THE BRITISH TARIFF. 66 'From a very period, customs duties have been charged on most articles imported into, or exported from England; and though inconsiderable at first, they increased with the increase of civilization and commerce, till they long ago formed one of the most copious sources of the public revenue, and now have attained to an extraordinary magnitude."-(M'Culloch.) In 1596, the revenue derived from customs duties was only £50,000. In 1792, only £4,409,000; while in 1839 it had swelled to £22,962,610. The schedule of the last Customs Act (3 & 4 William IV. c. 30,) contained 1150 arti