held confessed. Silence constitutes a Free-trader--which, by the way, is a decided improvement on the older system. If he speaks at all, eschewing politics and agriculture, he is held to be as clear a convert as though he had lunched with Cardinal Wiseman. If he utters a word about improvements in agriculture, he is a lost man for ever to the farmers. These may be very ingenious tactics, but those who invented them may rest assured that they have not imposed upon a single human being. It would be better, for their own credit and character, if they dropped them at once. Since the publication of the last quarter's revenue returns, we have had a perfect roar of affected jubilee from the members of the Free-trading press. A grand shout and a long one was doubtless necessary to drown the announcement of an almost unparalleled decrease in the account, exhibiting a falling off in nearly every regular item, and a rapid absorption of capital, as indicated by the returns of the Property-tax. But it certainly was rather a bold experiment to fix upon Lord Stanley as a Free-trader. For more than a fortnight we were regaled with leaders in the _Times_ and _Chronicle_, announcing that his lordship had publicly repudiated the principles of Protection at Bury; and yet, singularly enough, not containing that meed of compliment which might have been expected on the accession of so eminent a convert. This was a decided mistake. Their cue distinctly was to have extolled Lord Stanley to the skies, as a man utterly beyond the reach of prejudice, open to conviction, docile to the voice of reason, and persuaded of the error of his ways. Had they done so with sufficient adroitness, it is not beyond the verge of possibility that here and there some benighted people might have been induced to swallow the fable, and to conceive that because one statesman--whom we name not now--proved false to all his former professions and protestations, such changes are mere matter of course, sanctified and approved by custom. But the fraud was clumsily executed. The little children of apostasy--who are now left to their own devices, without any superintending guardian, and who, following their natural instincts, can do little else than undertake the fabrication of dirt-pies--have bedaubed themselves in a most woful manner. Anything more humiliating than the position of the _Morning Chronicle_ it is impossible to conceive. For, when met in the teeth with a direct refutation of their slanders, the writers are absolutely idiotical enough to assert that they drew their conclusions, not so much from what was said, as from what remained unsaid--not so much from words, as from tones and significant gestures! It is a sad pity that the idea is not original. It strikes us that there is something of the sort in the _Critic_, where Puff undertakes to make the audience acquainted with the whole, tenor of Lord Burleigh's cogitations, through a simple shake of the head.