In Scotland matters are no better. We have many instances of proprietors compelled by the decline of rents to abandon the improvement of their estates, and to relax that employment which was formerly given to labour. This is a great calamity; since it must inevitably tend to swell the poor-rate, already augmenting alarmingly. In the western districts the labour of Irish emigrants, forced from their own country by the same cause, and willing to work at the lowest possible rate of wage which will suffice to sustain existence, is supplanting that of our Scottish peasantry; and as the farmers are nearly driven to the wall by the unprecedented decline in the value of both corn and cattle, they cannot be blamed for putting into practice the noxious free-trade dogma, and availing themselves of labour at the cheapest rate. If this state of matters is to continue, the results may be terrible indeed. The legislature is bound to look to it in time; and, for the general safety, to take heed that the power of labour of the working man, which is his sole capital, is not tampered with too far. We cannot refrain from making another extract from the pages of Mr Wilson, who deprecates agricultural depression upon the express ground of its pernicious effect upon the condition and morals of the labourer. Any fall below 52s. 2d. per quarter of wheat, Mr Wilson estimates as depression. The present averages are under 40s., with no prospect of a rise:— “It must be obvious that the tendencies experienced by the farmer must immediately influence the labourers he employs. In his successful or advancing years, a good demand exists for labour, and either attracts or retains more to this pursuit than on an average it is capable of maintaining; and thus we find, when the period of diminished cultivation arrives, the strongest evidences of surplus labour, as of surplus stock—distress to a painful degree becomes the lot of the hard-working tiller of the ground, whose only desire is for ‘_leave to toil_;’ but, like his master, he had already toiled too much, and too unprofitably. Ignorant of the real causes of his distress, driven to pinch and want, he becomes too readily the victim of vicious and designing men, and has recourse to many acts of violence and injustice, which, instead of mending his case, can only tend to make it still worse.