But, indeed, although it be, I would not have you too deeply to distress yourself; although you have proved, unwittingly perhaps, an enemy to the farmer, it is not certain that your brother tenants will suffer irremediable ruin from the productions of your pen. Consider that the assaults of such an enemy British farmers may possibly withstand. To have forfeited the good opinion of your brother farmers is very unfortunate, but to have lost the approving smiles of men of rank is a sorer evil still. You seem utterly destitute and forsaken, and my sympathetic nature prompts me, therefore, to suggest to you another source of comfort. Remember that all really great men have been persecuted. Such is the way of this wicked world. Milton fell "on evil days and evil tongues," and yet his Tetrachordon "walked the town awhile numbering good intellects;" and most heartily did the "old man eloquent" denounce "the asses, apes, and dogs," that with barbarous noise environed him. This is your very case. The parallel is complete. Galileo, a great discoverer, although in a different department from yours, had his arguments distorted by an interested priest, and twice suffered the tortures of the Inquisition. You may be the agricultural Galileo of the nineteenth century. It may be that, like all men of genius, you are only before the age. In your present persecutions you may be only paying the penalty of your genius, and what the greatest benefactors of the human race have ever had to endure. Posterity will be more just, and give you your award when the ephemeral _Blackwood_ shall have perished and been forgotten. In the distant future you will be famous: consider this, and be no longer inconsolable. What reason have you for saying, (p. 4,) that the Protectionists employed the leading organ of their party in North Britain to write down this system? Does not the insinuation indicate a pitiful misrepresentation on your part, or an extraordinary ignorance? Has _Blackwood_ proved himself venal? have the writers of that periodical indicated mercenary tendencies? At the era of the late memorable tergiversation, which inflicted such a disgraceful wound on the political morality of our nation, did _Blackwood_ trim and temporise? On the contrary, did he not maintain his integrity, and nail his colours to the mast, and fight the battle which he had always fought? Are not the views and opinions advocated in the article to which you refer, the very views and opinions which _Blackwood_, with unswerving consistency, has always maintained? All the world knew this to be the fact, and what necessity was there for the Protectionists "employing" the leading organ to do what it had always done, and would infallibly continue to do?