Perhaps now you understand why the Free-Traders are so wroth against the boroughs. They expected to play off the latter against the county constituencies; and, being disappointed in that, they want to swamp them altogether. This, I must own, strikes me as particularly unfair. Let it be granted that a large number of the smaller boroughs did, at the last general election, manifest a decided wish that the Free Trade experiment, then begun, should be allowed a fair trial; are they to be held so pledged to that commercial system, that, however disastrous may have been its results, they are not entitled to alter their minds? Are all the representations, promises, and prophecies of the leading advocates of Free Trade, to be set aside as if these were never uttered or written? Who were the cozeners in this case? Clearly the men who boasted of the enormous advantages which were immediately to arise from their policy--advantages whereof, up to the present moment, not a single glimpse has been vouchsafed. Free Trade, we were distinctly told, was to benefit the boroughs. Free Trade has done nothing of the kind; on the contrary, it has reduced their business and lowered their importance. And now, when this effect has become so plain and undeniable that the very men who subscribed to the funds of the League, and who were foremost in defending the conduct of the late Sir Robert Peel, are sending Protectionists to Parliament, it is calmly proposed to neutralise their conversion by depriving them of political power! Under the circumstances, I do not know that the Free-Traders could have hit upon a happier scheme. The grand tendency of their system is centralisation. They want to drive everything--paupers alone excepted, if they could by possibility compass that fortunate immunity--into the larger towns, which are the seats of export manufacture, and to leave the rest of the population to take care of themselves. You see how they have succeeded in Ireland, by the reports of the last census. They are doing the same thing in Scotland, as we shall ere long discover to our cost; and, indeed, the process is going on slowly, but surely, throughout the whole of the British islands. I chanced the other day to light upon a passage in a very dreary article in the last number of the _Edinburgh Review_, which seems to me to embody the chief economical doctrines of the gentlemen to whom we are indebted for the present posture of affairs. It is as follows:--