It is hard to say whether, as society is now constituted and power distributed in this country, the fundholder has most to fear from years of general suffering or from periods of transient prosperity. Is the nation flourishing, are exports increasing, taxes well paid, a surplus revenue beginning to appear, and a huge store of useless and costly bullion accumulated in the bank? We are immediately told the surplus must be devoted to the remission of taxes: it is dangerous to leave the Treasury full; it is a temptation to Government, and serves to feed the younger sons of the aristocracy. No matter how fleeting the surplus may be, though it has arisen from an accidental combination of circumstances which may disappear before the year is out--and it is well known, taxes once taken off are very rarely reimposed--the surplus must be instantly relinquished for the _permanent_ remission of taxes. Are times adverse, do the heavens threaten monetary squalls, and is the import of grain and export of sovereigns likely to lay, as in 1847, half the commercial world on their beam-ends? Instantly the cry gets up that the taxes cannot be paid; that the national expenditure is shamefully extravagant; that the army must be disbanded, the ships of the line sold, and the national independence trusted to the generous cosmopolitan spirit of the Americans, or the unambitious disposition of the Czar. In both circumstances the national safety, and with it the security of the public creditor, are endangered: in the first, by the permanent remission of revenue, in consideration of a transient gleam of prosperity; in the last, by a permanent abandonment of the national defences, in consequence of a temporary period of disaster. And as we inevitably pass now, and must ever pass, under our wise and judicious system of Free Trade and a Fettered Currency, from the one to the other, it is evident that not a year passes over our heads that the security of the fundholders is not more and more endangered, and this by the effects of the very system which their own selfish and class legislation has introduced.