Go to the towns or the manufacturing districts, and ask how they are prospering. The cotton trade is threatening to shut up. The travellers are returning disconsolate to their employers with the news that orders are every day becoming more scarce, and money payments even scarcer. There is no joy or exultation now in Leeds or Bradford. The journeymen operatives are combining against the slop system. The _Morning Chronicle_ harrows up the feelings of its readers, by tearful tales of the misery and destitution which prevails throughout the large towns of the empire, and no human being can deny the truth of the appalling statements. Scottish philanthropists, on their midnight visits to the wynds of Edinburgh, are struck with amazement at the squalor and vice which they encounter, and not less with the shoals of destitute creatures who are hurrying, with perverse infatuation, from the free open country to the fated atmosphere of a loathsome city garret. They want to check the stream, and drive the current back again. But whither? In the country there is no work for these people. Machinery has forced the hand-loom from the villages; Free Trade is reducing the wages of the spade to nothing. From the Western Highlands, and from Ireland, those who have money enough left to secure a passage on ship-board are emigrating by thousands—it is, we are told by a correspondent, the briskest trade in Liverpool. Those who have no money left are trooping to the towns, with the prospect before them of a fate which might rend the heart of the most callous. Who would wish to be a statesman, if for the consequences of all his deeds he must be held accountable hereafter? Ask the master-manufacturers themselves how they are getting on, now that they have succeeded in their darling scheme of securing cheap food, and paralysing the home trade? You may ask if you will, but you will hardly obtain an answer, save through the medium of the trade circulars, all filled with dismal forebodings. Were another Cobden testimonial to be proposed just now, the subscriptions would scarcely purchase many shares in the most depreciated of the lines. Ask the gentlemen of the railway interest, what cause is in operation to crush down their traffic and annihilate their dividends? They will tell you to a man that it is the universal agricultural depression. Ask the iron-masters how they are thriving? At this moment they are trembling for the stability of their colossal fortunes.