We do hope and trust, that, notwithstanding all the political slang and misrepresentation with which, of late years, hired and uneducated adventurers have inundated the country, it is not necessary to point out to the thoughtful and well-disposed portion of our countrymen the extreme importance of maintaining the relations which have hitherto subsisted between Great Britain and her colonies. These relations have been notoriously the envy of every maritime state of Europe; they have proved invaluable to us in times of difficulty and danger; and in peace they have contributed greatly to our wealth, our commerce, and our aggrandisement. In the words of a colonial writer, whose pamphlet is now lying before us,— “Great Britain had for ages acted on the grand principle of creating a world for herself out of the countries of each hemisphere, to which her ships might carry the treasures of her factories and mines, and from which, in return, they might bring the products of each clime, not as from a foreign state, but an integral part of the empire. Her colonies fostered her marine establishment, which again united the most distant of her territories with the parent country in one mighty whole; (free trade substitutes foreign nations for colonies, with what result the world will see;) affording all the advantages which could be derived from trading with other nations in different parts of the world, without any of the draw-backs necessarily attending commercial intercourse, liable to interruption from war, or the capricious policy of people having different manners and customs from our own. She regulated this trade as she thought proper, her colonies going hand-in-hand with her, and, excepting in one unhappy instance, that of the Americans, where she unjustly attempted to take their money to pay her expenses, concord and prosperity marked the career of the nation and its dependencies. In an evil hour her manufacturers, elated with their good fortune, began to dream of making cloth for the whole globe. Political economists, instigated by them, advanced the specious and deceitful doctrines of free trade. The very phrase has a catching sound to men who are not disposed to study the interests of one country as opposed to those of another, and the belief in the infallibility of tenets so strenuously recommended gaining ground, until it became too strong for the government of the country, the humiliating spectacle was presented to the nation of a minister, who during a long public career, had been the most zealous opponent of the new doctrines, proposing to carry them into effect.”[8] Footnote 8: _Thoughts on British Guiana._ By a Planter. 2d Edition. Demerara, 1847.