We are not of the number of those who would contend that, under all times or circumstances, should a principle, or rather the system built upon a principle, be rigorously upheld in its application intact, sacred equally from modification on the one hand, as against radical revolution on the other. It cannot be denied that, under the protective system, have grown into their present gigantic proportions all the great manufacturing interests of Great Britain. But, with customary hardihood of assertion, maintain the economists--in whose wake follow the harder-mouthed, coarser-minded Cobdens of the League--although manufactures have flourished under such a system to an extent which has constituted this country the workshop of the world, they have so flourished in spite of the system; and, in its absence, left exposed to free unrestricted competition from abroad, must inevitably have progressed at a more gigantic rate of speed still. This is asserted to be in the order of nature, but as nature is every where the same--as the same broad features and first elements characterize all countries more or less alike--we ask for examples, for one example only, of the successful establishment and progress of any one unprotected industry. The demand is surely limited, and reasonable enough. The mendacious League, with the Brights and Cobdens of rude and riotous oratory, are daily trumpeting it in the towns, and splitting the ears of rural groundlings with the reiterated assertion that, of all others, the cotton manufacture owes nothing to protection. What!--nothing? Were general restrictive imposts on foreign manufactures no protection? Was the virtually prohibited importation of the cotton fabrics of India no boon? of India, root and branch sacrificed for the advancement of Manchester? Why, there are people yet alive who can recollect the day when Manchester cottons could not have stood one hour's competition with the free, or even 100 per cent taxed fabrics of India.[40] How, indeed, could competition have been possible, with the wages of weaving and spinning in India at three-halfpence per day, whilst for equal quantities and qualities of workmanship, the British weaver was earning five shillings, and the spinner ten shillings per day on the average? In 1780, Mr Samuel Crompton, the ingenious inventor of the mule frame for spinning, such as it exists to this day, and is the vast moving machine of cotton manufacturing greatness, stated that he obtained _fourteen_ shillings per lb. for the spinning and preparation of No. 40 yarn, twenty-five shillings for No. 60, and two guineas for No. 80. The same descriptions of yarns are now profitably making at prices ranging from about tenpence to twentypence per lb. At the same period common calicoes were saleable at about two shillings per yard, which now may be purchased for threepence. Will it be said that the Indian spinner and weaver by hand could not, at the same epoch, have produced their wares