What has prevented the realisation of so glorious a vision? what has stepped between Great Britain and the diadem encircling the earth thus presented to her grasp, and converted an empire which might now have daily, and for centuries to come, been growing in strength, overflowing with prosperity, unanimous in loyalty, into one declining in numbers, shivered in power, divided in opinion? Whence is it that, while the debates in Parliament are daily filled with the piteous, and, alas! too faithful accounts of Irish destitution, of metropolitan suffering, of agricultural distress, of industrial depression, the colonies are all meditating separation from the mother country, and Government at home, anticipating a severance of the empire which they can no longer defend, are already, like the Romans of old, abandoning the distant parts of the empire to their own resources? How has it happened that, after reading a glowing eulogium in the leading articles of the _Times_ on the prosperous condition of the country, the increase of its exports and imports, the cheapened food of its inhabitants, we read in the next columns of the very same paper a piteous statement from Lord Ashley on the frightful condition of the working-classes in the metropolis--a heart-rending account from Mr Reynolds of the daily declining resources and increasing pauperism of Ireland--an alarming statement, from the official return, of the daily increasing importation of foreign grain, at prices below what it can be raised at in this country--a decisive proof, in the monthly return, of the decline of British and increase of foreign shipping--and Lord Grey's circular to Australia and the Mauritius, announcing the approaching withdrawal of the British troops from those valuable settlements? Whence have arisen those obvious and undeniable and well-known symptoms of national decline, immediately after the opening of so glorious a dawn, and when the means of such lasting and universal prosperity had, by the benignity of a gracious Providence, been placed within our grasp?