Mr Cobden, on being twitted with the failure, or, at all events, the non-realisation of his unqualified prophecies, very naturally, but not very wisely, flies into a passion. He fixes, of course, upon the failure of the harvest of 1846 as the prime element of justification. Can I control the elements?--says he--can I regulate the seasons? Certainly not, Mr Cobden. We presume that no one, not even the stupidest operative that used to bellow in your congregation, and who believed every one of the golden promises which you were hardy enough to enunciate, ever dreamed that you were in possession of that power. Several of us, moreover, are of opinion that, upon the whole, you have been rather overrated as a conjurer, and that, having failed in your endeavours to get into an empty quart bottle, you are not a whit more likely to succeed when you come to experiment upon a pint. But let us whisper in your ear that this excuse will hardly serve your turn, and that it is wholly irreconcilable with the arguments which you used to advance. A copious supply of foreign grain was the very thing for which you and your associates primarily clamoured. You wanted an import to a prodigious extent, and you flattered yourselves that, for each quarter of American wheat, you would be able to send in exchange so many yards of that calico which you fondly maintain to be the principal fabric of the world. You were content, and you have said it over and over again, to take your chance of the home market, provided the other ones were opened to you. Now that you have them open, and now that wheat has come in such abundance as even your most sanguine anticipations could not have conceived, you have the coolness and effrontery to turn round and throw the blame upon Providence, for having speedily brought about the very thing which every charlatan in Great Britain has been shouting for since the anti-corn-law league began! Do you really think that this will go down with any portion of the community? that such deplorable wriggling will not insure you, throughout the country, the contempt of every man of average and common understanding? or that the labourer on short time, and the artisan whom you have deprived of his employment, will put up with such miserable excuses? The plain state of the fact is,--and you know it,--that your theories are crumbling beneath your feet. You cannot expect that your gross and egregious error will escape a speedy detection. You, without any previous qualification for the task, save your natural talent, which is not much, have thrust yourself forward to a prominence which you never were entitled to occupy. You may fancy yourself, if you choose, the people's man; but so were Jack Cade, and Wat Tyler, and several others, who, mistaking energy for knowledge, and ill-regulated enthusiasm for calm deliberate judgment, took upon themselves the task of misleading the English people, and either