No one need be told from what these melancholy results, after such splendid prospects, have arisen. _It is dereliction of principle which has done the whole._ A statesman was placed at the helm, of great ability, of unwearied industry, of vast influence, but who wanted the one thing needful for great statesman-like achievement--singleness and consistency of principle. He rose to power by the exertions of the Conservative party; and the first use he made of that power, when fully acquired, was to spread dissension among that party, and for a time destroy their influence. He made himself not the representative of the nation, but of a section of the nation; not of the British empire in every part of the world, but of Manchester and Glasgow. To their interests everything else was sacrificed. The agricultural interest was sacrificed by the repeal of the Corn Laws; the colonial, by the equalising the duties on sugar and wood; the shipping, by the repeal of the Navigation Laws; the manufactures for the home market, by the unrestrained admission of foreign manufactured produce. The interests of no class were consulted but those of the buyers and sellers of commodities, and of the great manufacturers for the _export_ sale, the class from whom Sir Robert Peel sprang; and as the interests of that class are on most points adverse to the interests of the rest of the community, the vast majority are now suffering for their benefit. The time was when such an anomaly as this could not have existed. Within the lifetime of half the present generation, the interests of the merchant, the manufacturer, and the farmer were identified; and no one of these classes could be benefited without extending the impulse to all the others. The toast of "The Plough, the Loom, and the Sail," was as regularly to be heard at public dinners as that of the "British Constitution, and may it be perpetual." But now neither is heard--they have gone out of fashion together. Whence this extraordinary, this woeful change, in so short a time, and in a nation which has not been subjected to the convulsions of at least a violent and bloody revolution? It is that the principle of protection to native industry has been abandoned by the Government. A section of the community has become so rich and powerful, from the shelter afforded to it during a hundred and fifty years of protective policy, that it has succeeded in setting all other classes at defiance, and changing our policy for its own immediate benefit, but their certain decline and ruin.