Without denying that there is much truth in these observations, and humbly acknowledging a Divine superintendence alike in the rise and the decline, the prosperity and decay, of nations, it yet appears more reasonable to trace the extraordinary obstinacy of the ruling party in the nation to the causes which, humanly speaking, seem to have been mainly instrumental in producing it. The fanaticism of the political economists, who, like all other fanatics, are inaccessible to reason or experience, is, without doubt, a main cause of the disastrous policy to which the nation seems now irrevocably pledged. But a still more powerful agent in producing the determined adherence to this system, in the face of the most conclusive evidence of its pernicious tendency, is to be found in the _class_ government which it is now apparent the Reform Bill has imposed upon the nation. It is now unhappily proved that the _trading_ interest, in whom a decisive majority both in the constituency and the number of seats in parliament has been vested by the Reform Bill, are alive, like all other classes, mainly to the suggestions of their own advantage; and that advantage they think is, to buy cheap and sell dear. Whatever we were in the days when Napoleon said it, we are now, if not a nation of shopkeepers, at least a nation _ruled by shopkeepers_. The colonies are entirely unrepresented. Schedules A and B, sixteen years ago, cut off all their representatives. The landed interest is in a minority, from two-thirds of the seats in the Commons being for boroughs; and those boroughs, owing to the depression of the producing classes by the currency laws, and the vast increase of the trading interests from the same cause, being for the most part under the direction of the commercial part of the community. It is in these circumstances that we are to look for the real causes of the adoption of free-trade principles of late years by our statesmen, and the determined adherence to it, in spite of all experience, by a majority of the House of Commons. Such conduct is the inevitable result of every _uniform_ system of representation, because that lands the government in the class government of the majority, composed of a particular interest. The evil was not felt under the old constitution, because it was _not_ a class government, being based on a multifarious, not a uniform representation. Its _defects_, as they are now called, _i. e._ its nomination boroughs, combined with the extension of our colonial and shipping interests, had let in a most efficient representation of _all_ the interests in the empire, as well as that of the inhabitants of those islands, into the House of Commons. It is to this cause that the protection of _all_ interests by the old House of Commons is to be ascribed. Doubtless, under the old system the Corn Laws would have been upheld; but the West Indies would have been saved from ruin, domestic industry rescued from bankruptcy and