The press in such circumstances becomes--what it was in Napoleon's time in France, from the overwhelming weight of military power--what Madame de Stael feared it would one day become in all aged communities--the most powerful engine for the diffusion and continuance of error. The most ruinous systems of public policy are then pursued with the cordial support of the _millionnaires_ who profit by them, with the loud applause and able assistance of the public press, who are guided by the requirements of their subscribers, or directed by the dictates of their shareholders, and amidst the supine indifference or sullen despair of the industrious classes, who are steeped in misery by their effects. They see they are ruined, but they know not how or by whom; and a large part of the public press are careful to direct their attention to any but the right quarter for redress. In despair at such an accumulation of distresses, the great bulk of mankind follow the usual instinct of the multitude in such cases--they fasten upon the seen in preference to searching for the unseen, and lend a willing ear to any demagogue of the day who lays before them plans for a great reduction of public burdens, by abandoning nearly the whole means of the public defence. Thus a perpetual reduction of our military and naval armaments, and means of maintaining our independence or even existence as a nation, is forced upon successive Governments, without the slightest regard to the obvious peril with which such reductions, with increasing armaments on the part of our neighbours, and increasing points of attack upon the part of ourselves, _must_ be attended; and the policy which has impoverished the greater part of the nation terminates in its natural result, the destruction of the nation itself. Such is the most common process of national ruin.