They think of the present administration as Mr. Canning formerly thought of it, and they think of Mr. Canning as all the world think. Is that all? Oh no! They speak against the renewal of the Income Tax; and this, in the opinion of some persons, is attacking what is more valuable than all our other institutions put together! For our own parts, our political confession of faith on this subject is short: we neither consider Lord Castlereagh as the Constitution, nor The Courier as the Country.

But if, after all, and in spite of our teeth, we should be forced to acknowledge that Sir Judkin Fitzgerald and the use of the torture, that the system of spies and informers, that Lord Sidmouth's sagacity, circulars, and travelling delegates, that arbitrary imprisonment and solitary confinement, the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus, Standing Armies, and Rotten Boroughs, Lord Castlereagh's past measures or future designs, Mr. Canning's love of liberty, and Mr. Vansittart's hankerings after the Income Tax, are all that is left valuable in our institutions, or respectable in the country, then we must say, that the more effectually the Opposition "attack all that is valuable in such institutions," the more we shall thank them; and that the sooner we can get rid of all that is " most respectable" in such a system, the less occasion we shall have to blush for the Country.

ENGLAND in 1798.
By S. T. Coleridge.

August 2, 1817.

"The Monthly Magazine tells us that this country has occasioned the death of 5,800,000 persons in Calabria, Russia, Poland, Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal. This country, reader, England! our country, our great, our glorious, our beloved country, according to this Magazine, has been the guilty

cause of all this carnage!"-So says Mr. Southey apud the Quar-' terly Review, 1817. Thus sings Mr. Coleridge, in his "Fears in Solitude," 1798:

"We have offended, oh! my countrymen!
We have offended very grievously,

And been most tyrannous.

Thankless too for peace;

(Peace long preserv'd by fleets and perilous seas)
Secure from actual warfare, we have lov'd
To swell the war-whoop, passionate for war!
Alas! for ages ignorant of all

Its ghastlier workings (famine or blue plague,
Battle, or siege, or flight through wintry snows),
We, this whole people, have been clamorous
For war and bloodshed; animating sports,
The which we pay for as a thing to talk of,
Spectators and not combatants! No guess
Anticipative of a wrong unfelt,
No speculation on contingency,
However dim and

vague, too vague and dim
To yield a justifying cause; and forth
(Stuff'd out with big preamble, holy names,
And adjurations of the God in Heaven),
We send our mandates for the certain death
Of thousands and ten thousand! Boys and girls,
And women, that would groan to see a child
Pull off an insect's leg, all read of war,
The best amusement for our morning's meal!
The poor wretch, who has learnt his only prayers
For curses, who knows scarcely words enough
To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father,
Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute
And technical in victories and defeat,

And all our dainty terms for fratricide;

Terms which we trundle smoothly o'er our tongues,
Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which

We join no feeling and attach no form!
As if the soldier died without a wound;

As if the fibres of this godlike frame

Were gored without a pang; as if the wretch
Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds,

Pass'd off to heaven, translated, and not killed ;-
As though he had no wife to pine for him-
No God to judge him! Therefore, evil days
Are coming on us, O my countrymen!
And what if all-avenging Providence,
Strong and retributive, should make us know
The meaning of our words; force us to feel
The desolation and the agony

Of our fierce doings!

I have told,

O Britons! O my brethren! I have told
Most bitter truth, but without bitterness.
Nor deem my zeal or factious or mistimed:
For never can true courage dwell with them,
Who playing tricks with conscience, dare not look
At their own vices. We have been too long
Dupes of a deep delusion !-Others, meanwhile,
Dote with a mad idolatry; and all

Who will not fall before their images,

And yield them worship, they are enemies.
Even of their country!

Such have 1 been deem'd.” *

-

S. T. C.

* That he might be deemed so no longer, Mr. COLERIDGE Soon after became passionate for war himself; and “swell'd the war-whoop" in the Morning Post. "I am not indeed silly enough," he says, " to take as any thing more than a violent hyperbole of party debate, Mr. Fox's assertion that the late war (1802) was a war produced by the MORNING Post; or I should be proud to have the words inscribed on my tomb."-Biographia Literaria, vol. i. p. 212.

ON THE EFFECTS OF WAR AND TAXES.

"Great princes have great playthings. Some have play'd

At hewing mountains into men, and some

At building human wonders mountain-high.

But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at."

COWPER.

August 31, 1817.

THE whole question of the effect of war and taxes, in an economical point of view, reduces itself to the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. It is a pity that some member of the House of Commons does not move a string of resolutions on this subject, as a comment on the measures of the present, and a guide to those of future reigns. A film appears to have been spread for some time over the eyes of the nation, as to the consequences of the course they were pursuing; and a good deal of pains has been taken, by sophistry, and false statements, to perplex a very plain question. But we are not without hopes, in the following observations, of putting the merits of our debt and taxes in so clear a light, that not even the Finance Committee shall be any longer blind to them.

Labour is of two kinds, productive and unproductive :-that which adds materially to the comforts and necessaries of life, or that which adds nothing to the common stock, or nothing in proportion to what it takes away from it in order to maintain itself. Money may be laid out, and people employed in either of these two kinds of labour equally, but not, we imagine, with equal benefit to the community.-[See p. 109, &c. of this volume.]

Suppose I employ a man in standing on his head, or running up and down a hill all day, and that I give him five shillings a day for his pains. He is equally employed, equally paid, and equally gains a subsistence in this way, as if he was employed, in his original trade of a shoemaker, in making a pair of shoes

for a person who wants them. But in the one case he is employed in unproductive, in the other in productive labour. In the one, he is employed and paid and receives a subsistence for doing that which might as well be let alone; in the other, for doing that which is of use and importance, and which must either be done by him, or give some one else double trouble to do it. If I hire a livery-servant, and keep him fine and lazy and well-fed to stand behind my chair while I eat turtle or venison, this is another instance of unproductive labour. Now the person who is in real want of a pair of shoes, and who has by his own labour and skill raised money enough to pay for them, will not assuredly lay it out, in preference, in hiring the shoemaker to run up a hill for him, or to stand upon his head, or behind a chair for his amusement.* But if I have received this money from him in the shape of taxes, having already received enough in the same way to pay for my shoes, my stockings, my house, my furniture, &c. then it is very likely (as we see it constantly happen) that I shall lay out this last five shillings worth of taxes, which I probably get for doing nothing, in employing another person to do nothing, -or to run up a hill, or to stand upon his head, or wait behind me at dinner, while the poor man, who pays me the tax, goes without his shoes and his dinner. Is this clear? Or put it thus in two words. That is productive labour, for which a man will give the only money he has in the world, or a certain sum, having no more than other people: that is unproductive labour, for which a man will never give the only money he is worth, the ́money he has earned by his own labour, nor any money at all, unless he has ten times as much as he wants, or as other people

* We never knew but one instance to contradict this opinion. A person who had only fourpence left in the world, which his wife had put by to pay for the baking of some meat and a pudding, went and laid it out in purchasing a new string for a guitar. Some one on this occasion quoted the lines,

"And ever against eating cares,

Wrap me in soft. Lydian airs."

S