working or pauper population: it does not wring the pence from the hands of the peasant. It spares all incomes under £150; and are we now to be deliberately told, when this impost is sought to be made permanent, that the lawyers, physicians, and tradesmen of Dublin are to be exempted from an assessment, occasioned by a general defalcation of the revenue, to the gross injury of their professional brethren who have the misfortune to reside in Edinburgh? But we go a great deal further than this. We say, that if exemption is to be given to the Irish landlords, a stronger case for the same immunity may be preferred in behalf of the landowners throughout the greater part of Scotland. The cruel suppression of the kelp manufacture has long ago reduced a vast portion of the population located in the Western Highlands and Islands to a state of pauperism. Poor-rates have been enormously increased; and the failure of the potato-crop was felt in those districts at least as severely as in Ireland. Very scanty indeed was the relief doled out by government here, at the time when large supplies were forced into the turbulent island; the burden of maintaining the poor was thrown upon our proprietors; and their reward is to be an augmented income-tax of five per cent, whilst the Irish, as usual, are to go free! Really, when we consider this matter in its broad and open bearing, the injustice appears so enormous, that we can hardly bring ourselves to believe that it is seriously intended to perpetrate it. At all events our course is clear. There can be no party distinctions in such a matter as this. Whatever difference of opinion may exist as to the policy of continuing the income-tax, there can be none as to the propriety of its just and equal distribution throughout the empire. The voice of Scotland must be heard upon this point, and loudly too, else our fragmentary representation is nothing more than a shadow and a dream. We trust that both the counties and the towns will bestir themselves to oppose this meditated act of spoliation; and by a ready and united resistance, compel the ministry to remember that higher and weightier considerations than the command of some Irish votes are involved in a question so momentous and so vital to the whole community.