The dismal efforts of the Free-trading party to maintain the credit of their unnatural and mischievous scheme, afford the surest indication of their own consciousness that they have committed a grievous error. In their attempts to make head against the symptoms of reaction which are everywhere apparent in the public mind, they exhibit no unity of purpose; they are not agreed even as to the facts from which their arguments should be drawn. A few months ago, we were told that the whole country was in a state of the greatest prosperity. The existence of agricultural distress was denied; the shipping interest was said to be in the most healthy and flourishing condition; the manufacturers had so many orders that their ability to execute was impeded; wages were rising--pauperism decreasing--in short, no one could recall to memory times of more general happiness and content. Such was the picture drawn by Ministerial limners, no further back than the opening of the present session of Parliament, and it is very much to be regretted that it should so soon have vanished like a dissolving view. Down to the present moment, we have been unable to discover the motive for so monstrous a fiction. Nobody believed it: nobody could believe it, for it ran counter to every man's knowledge of his own affairs, and his opinion as to those of his neighbour. The agriculturists declared it to be a falsehood in so far as they were concerned--so did the ship-owners--so did the shopkeepers--so did the manufacturers, whose circulars acknowledged depression for the present, and held out little hope for the future. The Ministerial averment answered no purpose, save to excite a general burst of disapprobation. Conceived in fraud, it was abandoned with cowardice. A lower tone was assumed. Distress was admitted--but only to a certain extent; and we may remark that such admissions are peculiarly convenient and innocuous to those who make them, inasmuch as the actual degree or prevalence of the suffering must still remain matter of debate. Indeed, no statistics, however ingenious or elaborated, can furnish data for determining so delicate a point. But to account for the existence of distress, even in a mitigated form, was no easy task for those who were resolved, at all hazards, to exclude the operation of free trade. Their prosperity balance-sheet stood awkwardly in the way. Pluming themselves upon increased exports, and a larger foreign trade than had been driven for some years, they were compelled to assign some reason for the remarkable depression at home. The old shift of railway calls would no longer suit their purpose. Sir Robert Peel, regardless of a certain personal passage of his life connected with the opening of the Trent Valley, was exceedingly fond of turning out that scape-goat into the wilderness; but the time had gone by; the calls were paid up or suspended; and it was no longer possible for effrontery to maintain that the great mass of