"The world is not now as it was two hundred years ago. There are no new countries to discover,--no new sources of riches that can be held in monopoly, or to be found out of the bounds of the civilised world. Look at California. Can the Americans keep it to themselves? All the world goes there. England must then give up her commercial policy, which for centuries, whether good or bad, has certainly been compatible with advancing greatness, and she must start in a new race, with nations superior to her in natural resources, and with the weight of £800,000,000 of debt on her back; and to obtain even a place in this race, proposed by herself, she must break up all her artificial system, with the social relations established under it; thus destroying the fortunes and happiness of multitudes, inviting revolution, and risking the extinction of her debt, which will add hundreds of thousands of miserable broken creditors to the multitude of revolutionists. "Well, she may survive all this, and, perhaps, be happier within her natural bounds; but she cannot be a great nation; and she has to choose between her present greatness and an uncertain prospect of humbler content, to which she must wade amidst blood and social commotion. But will she be allowed to enjoy that humbler contentment? Will not ambition stir other nations, when they find their power to oppress her? What will her courage avail her then? Modern warfare depends entirely upon mechanical and manufacturing resources, in which her enemies will have a lead over her, because their natural resources are greater, and Free Trade will have taught them how to make the most of them. "I do not give you all this dogmatically, but I cannot myself see that Free Trade will produce any other results; and I look upon it as certain, that if other nations do not adopt our Free Trade notions, that we cannot put them in practice without destroying the National Debt: in other words, a fatal struggle between the landed and moneyed interest. "Free Trade for England is, I think, well illustrated by the story of the bear in Marryat's _Captain Violet_:--'Bruin being up a peach-tree, was vigorously shaking down the fruit for his own eating, but a hog was below very complacently eating the peaches as they fell, and expressing by grunts his satisfaction at the bear's generosity.'--Yours, &c., "Feb. 2, 1850. WILLIAM NAPIER."