It is to me perfectly clear, and the fact is tacitly admitted by a large portion of the community engaged in mercantile and manufacturing pursuits, that a most trying and fearful crisis is at hand; and that the present summer will not end without her Majesty’s Ministers, and the Free Trade party, being compelled to acknowledge that the speech from the Throne, and the representations of prosperity made by them at the opening of Parliament, were, if not deliberate perversions of the truth, at all events most ill-considered and hasty. We had in February last, it is now evident, no such thing as even prosperous manufactures, or a healthy state of commerce. Whilst these representations were being made, and agricultural pursuits alone pointed to as being in a state of temporary depression, the leading manufacture of the country was being carried on without profit, and our merchants and traders were feeling the ground shake beneath their feet. It is of no use, however, to refer to the past. The questions for the nation now to consider are—first, What is it which has brought about this general prostration of the country? and next, Where is the remedy to be applied? It is idle for the Free-traders to point any longer to potato rots, to railway manias, or to high prices of cotton, as the cause of the failure of their predictions of coming general prosperity. The truth is palpably before the world that the foreign trade, stimulate it as we may, will not employ the industry of the country; and that a prosperous home trade is indispensably necessary to render the foreign trade a profitable one. It is equally idle to tell us that the present state of things is only temporary, and that a different result of our recent policy will be attained by and by. In what direction are we to look for the change? Is any new world about to be discovered? Is there a single outlet to be found for our manufactures, which we cannot close up in a month? I confess that I cannot discern a gleam of hope for the future, or a prospect of the restoration of this great nation to its wonted prosperity, except in a total reversal of the legislation of the past few years, by which, and by which alone, has been caused that prostration of its industry and enterprise, which we are now witnessing on every side—in our own once happy land, and throughout the length and breadth of that vast colonial empire, once the pride of Great Britain, and the envy of the world, but now her shame, ruined and robbed as it has been by the legislation of designing or incapable statesmen. With our agricultural population fast sinking into pauperism and insolvency, or taking flight from our shores, as from those of an infected land, to fertilise with their capital and enterprise other soils, which own protective governments and a kindred people; with the landed aristocracy of the kingdom, and squirearchy and the yeomen, stripped of half their