To those who have closely observed the opinions expressed regarding the colonies, in the debates upon free trade, little need be said to prove that the Manchester school of politicians not only considered their connexion with Britain as of no importance, but as actually undesirable in itself. There was no attempt made at harmonising interests with them. There was no intention expressed of making sacrifices for them, and incidentally, as we shall show, for England. There was no respect paid to their love of Britain; for loyalty is not a word in the free-trade catalogue. But there was a studious and intentional under-rating and disparaging of them and their country, to subserve the free-trade cause, and to destroy the force that the argument of their ruin might possibly have upon the people of England. They were made the subject too of cold, mercenary calculations, which were enough to insult them into sedition, and to disgust them out of their connexion with the mother country. When the disastrous effect that the loss of a protection, to the benefits of which they had been educated by England for fifty years, and to which the whole business arrangements of their country were as much adapted and which they as much required as the very crops in their ground required sunshine and rain—when these were pointed out in England, how were they met by the free-trade leaders? Was it not by cold calculations of how much they consumed per head of this, and how much they consumed, in comparison with the rest of the world, of that; and how much they cost for this, and how little they required of that; until, by some strange mystification of arithmetic, they were made out to be an actual injury to England. And had the colonies the satisfaction, if they must needs be injured and crippled, of knowing that one single individual connected with the free-trade movement had the justice to regret the injury that was being perpetrated against them, and to say, that England would endeavour to retrieve it in some other way? We believe we are justified in saying there was not one. The vilification of the colonies was an argument in favour of free trade, and they were vilified. And when the consequences of free trade upon the colonies have been alluded to; when the shops which had been built, in expectation of the agricultural interests of the country being stimulated as they had formerly been, and large quantities of land being taken up and cleared, as was formerly the case—when these shops became unrequired and useless; when store-houses, and wharves, and vessels, and steamers, which, before free trade came into operation, were full of activity, life, and business, became as so much dead property on the hands of their owners, and the people connected with them had to seek a livelihood by other means, and in other places than the colonies: when these disastrous consequences of free trade were experienced and pointed out, how were