The legislation of Great Britain, for the last ten years, is marked by some peculiar and distinctive features over that of perhaps any other portion of her legislative history. These are eminently, a studied and intentional disregard of the teachings and the experience of the past, in an overweening confidence in the wisdom of present measures, and their being proof against all future disasters; a sort of supercilious spurning, in sailing under the new canvass of free trade, of all the old landmarks which saved England’s power from many a shipwreck, and her glory from many a stain. It will hardly be denied, that that portion of Great Britain’s national worth which is made up of her achievements, of her glory, ever well-earned, and of her fame, ever dearly bought, has been and is regarded, by the philosophy of the Manchester school of politicians, as a possession by no means worth its cost, and little worth the keeping. May it not, in truth, be fairly presumed, from the movements that have followed the portentous measure of _free trade_, and from the recent agitations and speeches of its principal promoters, that they are seeking to establish a new description of glory for Great Britain; that they are endeavouring to change her whole national character; that they are, in short, seeking to raze all the former monuments, sacred to _her_ greatness, in order to construct, in their stead, monuments sacred to their own? Clearly the spirit of the age, in so far as they have evoked it, is destructive alike of reverence for the wisdom, and pride in the achievements, of the past. Neither is it unnatural, with the views of this school of politicians, that it should be so. The free-trade movement has ever advanced, in proportion as it succeeded in converting Great Britain to the belief, that the whole mind of the past was shrouded in darkness and error. It could not, therefore, be expected to inspire admiration or reverence, for what it thus practically taught men to condemn and repudiate. And it may well indeed seek to establish a new and a great glory for Britain; for assuredly great is the glory, and great is the national possession of which it is fast bereaving her. The essential spirit of national patriotism—that chivalrous feeling of disinterestedness, which once made Britons proud of forgetting the world for their country, and themselves in its defence—where is it?—what is now swiftly becoming its doom? Is it not palpably withering beneath the cold shadow of free-trade philosophy? Are not the cosmopolitan doctrines of free trade rapidly making Britons forget their country? Are these doctrines not absorbing all the energies of the nation in the struggles of avarice? Are they not sinking every patriotic, every noble national feeling, in the love of gain? Speak now of a measure involving the glory, the shame, and the interests of England, or of even a single class in England, and what will be its