There does not exist in this great and populous country any one class the labour of which can be restricted, or the profits curtailed, without an injurious result to the interests of the whole community. This is not simply a maxim of political economy; it is a distinct physical fact, which no ingenuity can controvert. Yet, strange to say, our rulers have acted, and are acting, with regard to by far the most important class of the country, as if no such fact were known; and they now profess to be amazed at its speedy and inevitable consequence. That agricultural distress must react upon the manufacturer, the trader, shopkeeper, and artisan, is as necessary a consequence as is a failure in the supply of water after a long-continued drought. If our taxation is artificial, and our national establishments costly, it must not be forgotten that our private expenditure is generally on the same scale. We consume within the country a far greater amount of manufactures than we can ever hope to export, and the only limit to that consumption is the power of purchase. The profits of the landowner, which depend upon the value of produce, do not constitute a fund which is removed from public circulation. On the contrary, these profits furnish the means of labour and employment to the greater portion of the industrious classes, who otherwise would have no resource; and if they are violently curtailed, it must needs follow that a large amount of employment is withdrawn. That is precisely our case at the present moment. By the admission of foreign produce, which is in fact foreign labour, the value of agricultural production in this country has fallen very nearly thirty per cent, and the consequence is a greatly diminished expenditure, and a slackening of employment grievously felt by those who are supported by manual labour. How, indeed, is it possible that it can be otherwise? A very little thought must convince every one that all incomes in Britain must depend upon the amount and value of the national production, and that, by reducing and lowering that, a direct attack is made upon the profits of every kind of labour. It is singular that consequence so plain should ever have been overlooked; still more singular that statesmen should have been found to maintain an opposite theory. The only explanation we can suggest as to this singular departure from the leading principles of economical science is, that of late years Ministers have habitually consulted the interests of the capitalists rather than those of the people. Sir Robert Peel has invariably shown himself a capitalist legislator. At the outset of his career, and while under the Israelitish guidance of Ricardo, he succeeded in carrying those Currency measures which increased by nearly one-third the weight of the national obligations. Later in life we find him engaged in measures of arbitrary bank restriction, thereby occasioning commercial panics, and securing another rich harvest for the moneyed class.