The first of these is the fatal and still undiminished influence of the _political economists_ in the legislature. So great and disastrous has it been, that we do not hesitate to say, that we regard that sect as the worst enemies the empire ever had. What has made them so disastrous to the best interests of their country is, that they have introduced the custom of looking upon the science of government, not as a matter to be based upon experience, modified by its lessons, but as consisting of theories to be determined entirely by general reasonings, and considered to depend solely on the conclusions of philosophers, in works of abstract thought. They have thus come to disregard altogether the sufferings of nations or classes of society under their systems, and to adhere to them obstinately in the midst of general ruin and lamentation, as Dr Sangrado did to his bleedings and hot-water cure, though they had occasioned more funerals than the siege of Troy? They look upon a nation as the surgeon does upon a patient who is held down on the marble table to undergo an operations. This was just the case with Turgot--one of the first and most eminent of the economists, and who began the French Revolution by introducing their doctrines into French legislation. "He regarded," says Senac de Meilhan, "the body corporate not as a living and sentient, but as a lifeless and insensible substance, and operated upon it with as little hesitation as an anatomist does on a dead body." Beyond all doubt it was the suffering produced by the contraction of the currency from 1826 to 1830 that brought about the storm of discontent which issued in the Reform Bill. And if the empire is to be further revolutionised, and the Chartist agitation is to end in household or five-pound suffrage, it will unquestionably be owing to the wide-spread misery which the combined operation of free-trade and a fettered currency have extended through the empire.