transported and ships maintained by it. From this cause, the debility of advanced years necessarily and very shortly comes over every maritime community which is not perpetually reanimated by the trade with its own colonies, just as the weakness of age prostrates every family which is not upheld by the growing strength of its own younger branches. History abounds with the proofs of this great and leading truth, which strikes at once at the root of the reciprocity system, and demonstrates that it is to our own colonies, and not the trade with independent states, that we must look for the means both of upholding our maritime superiority, and obtaining subsistence or employment to our numerous and rapidly increasing population. But it is sufficient to refer, amidst a host of others, to two facts which are of themselves decisive of the position. America and Canada are both rising states of European descent, with the same language, habits, occupations, and external circumstances; but the one is a colonial dependency of Great Britain, and the other is an independent state. And what is the result? Why, our North American colonies, with a population of only 1,500,000 souls, employ 560,000 tons of British and 530,000 of native shipping; while America, with a population of 14,000,000 of souls, only gave employment, in 1831, to 91,000 British tons; though the exports to it, in 1836, rose to £13,000,000. The whole remainder was taken off in American bottoms, which amounted to 250,000 tons, proving thus, incontestably, how rapidly an increasing trade with a foreign state, in an old commercial community, comes to glide into the foreign in preference to the home vessels. Again, the tonnage of Great Britain employed in the trade with all the states of Europe is now considerably less than it was thirty-five years ago; while that with our own colonies, during that period, has increased more than five-fold. In fact, it is the vast extent and rapid increase of our colonial commerce which has compensated the decline of the foreign trade with independent states, and rendered the nation blind to the rapid strides which the reciprocity system is making in destroying our shipping employed in such intercourse with other states; and yet, by a singular perversity of intellect, the reciprocity advocates continue to * See Porter's Progress of the Nation, i. 217. refer to the sum total of our exports and shipping returns, as evidence in their favour, when it is produced only by the progressive growth of the system they deprecate over that which they support. There never was a country so evidently destined by Providence, so nobly endowed by nature, with all the gifts requisite to make it the heart and soul of all the European colonies over the globe, as Great Britain. Placed on the edge of the European States, cradled in the Atlantic waves, she is "the midway station given" between the energy, wealth, and enterprise of Europe, and the boundless realms of future greatness and population in distant parts of the world. Abounding to overflowing with coal and ironstone, she possesses within herself, in inexhaustible profusion, the means of creating both the moving power and the manufacturing implements necessary to cover the earth with her fabrics. Blessed for ages with a free constitution, teeming in all quarters with the ardour of freedom, singularly tempered with moderation and ultimate sobriety of judgment, she is powerfully moved by the ardour and energy which are the great characteristics of democratic societies; and yet she has hitherto, as if by a miracle, been protected, by aristocratic foresight, from the ruinous explosions which in almost every other instance have torn asunder the state machine where this democratic ardour has been generated within its bosom. The consequences of this extraordinary combination of popular energy with patrician direction, of natural advantages with adaptation of character, have been, that her trade has been raised to a colossal magnitude, amounting last year to £105,000,000 of exports; that her flag is seen, and her influence is felt, in every quarter of the earth; that in the east, in the west, and in the south, vast empires are arising out of her overflowing numbers; and that it is already the boast of her Transatlantic descendants, that to the Anglo-Saxon race is destined the sceptre of the globe. Numerous as are the evils, both social, physical, and political, which have arisen, perhaps unavoidably, from so extraordinary a destiny being reserved for a little island in the Atlantic; and obvious as are the dangers, both external and internal, which now menace the very existence of society, and the duration of all those blessings and this godlike career of usefulness in the British islands, there is yet none of them which does not admit of an easy ultimate remedy, by a due attention to our colonial dependencies; nor any one which may not be converted into a source of strength, if the obvious destiny of Great Britain, as the propagator of Christian principles and the European race through the globe, is not forgotten, amidst the insane jealousy or monstrous folly of the dominant multitude in these islands. Are we overwhelmed with a redundant and rapidly increasing population? Do we find 24,000,000-an enormous multitude of inhabitants-in two islands of such limited extent as Great Britain and Ireland? Are we reasonably anxious how such a prodigious crowd of human beings, increasing at the rate, it is said, of a thousand a day, in a great degree dependent, directly or indirectly, on foreign commerce, are to be maintained, if the outlets of that commerce come to be impaired or closed up amidst the vicissitudes of future war, or the fast increasing decay of national strength? Let us turn to our colonies, and there we shall find young and rapidly growing states, to which all that surplus population would prove the most inestimable of blessings, and whose boundless wastes invite the hand of laborious industry, and the powers of European art, to convert them into fruitful fields. Do we fear, in the rapid progress and keen rivalry of European manufactures, and the uniform and immovable jealousy of European governments, the decline or extinction. of the accustomed vents for our manufactured produce in the Old World ?-Let us look to the east, the west, and the south, and we shall see empires rising up, with the strength of armed men, in whose industry, wealth, and prosperity, is to be found the surest guarantee, not merely of the continuance, but of the boundless increase of our manufactured exports and maritime strength all over the world. Do we observe with dread the progress of anarchical principles amongst us, and mark the advent of that second, and well-known, and often-predicted period in revolutionary progress, when the working-classes who continue, are striving to revolt against the rule of the middle classes who command, the movement ?-Even here, too, the handwriting on the wall of ages, while it marks our danger, VOL. 1. U points also to the only specific by which a remedy can be applied. These widespread discontents-this monstrous revolutionary ambition, which would convert the illiterate and rash, and too often corrupted and profligate operatives of great cities, into the rulers of the state, is chiefly dangerous, because it is pent up within narrow limits it is by opening the safety-valve that the danger of the explosion is to be prevented. This violent democratic spirit is the mainspring of emigration-this impatience of control, this desire to rule, is the centrifugal force intended by Providence to overcome the cohesive effect of habit and civilised enjoyment; and to send forth the burning democrat to the wilderness of nature, with the Bible in one hand and the axe in the other, to attempt realising in new worlds those fabled dreams of liberty and equality which never can be realised in the old, and seek on distant shores that freedom of which, in his apprehension, Europe has become unworthy. Is Ireland a source of incessant disquietude? Has experience now proved, that all the efforts made to ingraft civilisation and order on its semi-barbarous, Celtic, priest-ridden population, are ineffectual?-that we have given them emancipation, of which they were unworthy, and reform which has been prolific only of ruin?—that conflagration, rapine, and murder, are steadily advancing before the instigation of an aspiring hierarchy, and atrocities the most frightful are daily committed under the eyes of a democratic government, by a reckless, bloody-minded, infuriated peasantry? Even in these melancholy circumstances the darkest stain which the history of the world has yet affixed to the Catholic faith, and the cause of freedom and toleration-a ray of hope, opening a vista of ultimate felicity, is yet to be found in the capabilities for receiving the surplus population of the country which the colonies possess. Here, as in almost all other cases where priestly ambition combined with revolutionary passion fires the torch, it is agrarian distress and widespread misery which has laid the train; and, if we would apply the only effectual remedy to the multiplied evils which have so long fastened on that devoted land, we must commence by affording a vent to the overwhelming multitudes who now overspread its surface, and by finding employ ment to the industrious poor who may be left behind. Here, again, the colonies start up to lend a helping hand to the empire, when almost sinking in the waves under the load of that passion-desolated land. The innumerable bands of half-employed, half-civilised, half-starving bigots, who now encumber its surface-the ready instruments, within its narrow and wasted bounds, of priestly ambition or democratic vengeance-possess qualities which, if properly directed, might be productive of prosperity, wealth, and comfort, to themselves and all around them. Diffused over the boundless wastes of America, Southern Africa, and Australia, they would find ample employment in reclaiming the wilderness to the first stage of improvement; converted, by comparative comfort, to industrious habits, they would cease to follow the hideous trade of assassination and conflagration; enabled to bring up, in rude plenty, a numerous offspring, they would become the progenitors of a bold, and hardy, and independent yeomanry. Insensibly, in the course of a few generations, their ferocity would be converted into valour, their restlessness into activity, their indolence into exertion, their disregard of human blood into the love of country and home. From elements the most discordant, from materials the most unpromising, from passions the most desolating in their native seats, Great Britain possesses the means, not only of effectually liberating her own territory from the dreadful evils under which it labours, but of realising in distant lands the beautiful vision of the poet : "Come, bright Improvement! in the car of time, Is money awanting to carry these generous designs into effect?-are the resources of the State, and more than |