given to the dealers in or consumers of the commodities which they transport. Is the nation, as a whole, any gainer by that transfer? If ten pounds are taken from John and given to James, are John and James, taken together, any gainers by the transfer? And is not the great family of the nation composed of all its members, not of John only, but of John and James taken together? Is not the repeal of the Navigation Laws, in this view robbing Peter to pay Paul? This is the mighty advantage, for the attainment of which we are going to crush by external competition our mercantile shipping; and endanger the national independence, by withering the nursery of the navy, by which it can alone be maintained! Can there be a stronger proof of how completely, by the operation of the Reform Bill, we have fallen under the influence of class government; and how entirely such class government blinds the vision even of the most clear-sighted, to any thing but the perception of its own immediate interests? The evidence taken before the Commons' committee, on the comparative cost of building and navigating ships in the north of Europe and in this country, comes to this, that both are about _twice_ as expensive in this country as on the shores of the Baltic. A copper-sheathed vessel, which there costs £4500, cannot here be constructed for less than £9000: a master's wages there, which are £2, 11s. a month, are here £5 for the same period: seamen's, there 7d. a day, besides provisions, &c., are here 1s. 2d. Every thing else is in the same proportion. Shipbuilding and ship-navigating are twice as costly in Great Britain as they are in Norway and Denmark. How could it be otherwise, when they have the materials of ships and rigging at their doors, while we have to transport them to the British shores from Canada or the Baltic; and they are the poor nations, whose money being scarce goes far, and we are the rich one, whose money being comparatively plentiful goes but a little way. Compare the cost of living in London during the season, with what it is in Aberdeen or Inverness, and you will at once see the main cause of the extraordinary difference in the value of money, and consequently in the money-price of articles, in the two situations. The difference in the cost of shipbuilding and seamanship, viz. one half, is nearly the same as the difference in the cost of raising sugar in our free-labour colonies and the foreign slave ones, which is £10 a ton in the former situation, and £4 in the latter. And it is in the perfect knowledge of the entire ruin which the approach even to a free trade in sugar has brought, under these circumstances, upon the British West India islands, that government are prepared to force a similar disastrous competition upon the British shipowners, and through them on the palladium of British independence, the royal navy.