Such are the _advantages_, in consideration of which the nation has embarked on a course of policy which so evidently, and in so many ways, threatens our independence. It is class government which has done it all--the determination to make the sovereign worth two sovereigns, and a day's labour to the poor man worth one shilling to him instead of two, which has induced dangers in every quarter, which threaten the existence of Great Britain. Why is it that we are constrained--though Government are perfectly aware of the danger, and the Duke of Wellington has repeatedly pointed it out--to have a military and naval force evidently incommensurate to the wants of our vast empire, and unable to defend it from the hostility which our foreign policy does so much to provoke? Simply because we have surrendered the government of the country to a moneyed oligarchy, who are resolved, _coute qui coute_, to cheapen everything, because it enhances the value of their realised wealth, and because the measures of that oligarchy have cut down Queen Victoria's income from £100,000,000--as it might have been, and _is now, in real weight upon the country_[16]--to £50,000,000; just as they have reduced the income of the poor needlewomen from 9d. a-day to 4-1/2d. Why is it that we are constrained, openly and avowedly, to abandon our colonies to their own resources? Only because the cheapening system and Free Trade have so paralysed and weakened our resources, that, like the Romans, if we would protect at all the heart of the empire, we must forthwith abandon its extremities.