This class is that of manufacturers for the _export_ sale. When Great Britain was a self-supporting country, as it was to all practical purposes down to 1842, the growth of our manufactures, whether for the home or the foreign market, acted immediately and powerfully on the interests of all other classes, agricultural and commercial, with which they were surrounded. They eat the British or Irish farmer's bread and beef; they were clothed in the British manufacturer's clothing; the machinery they made use of was made by English hands; their goods, when completed, were exported in British bottoms; and the profits of the master manufacturers, who put the whole in motion, were for the most part spent in the purchase of British luxuries and the encouragement of British industry. Thence the universal feeling, that the interest of all classes was identical, and that you could not benefit the one without at the same time benefiting the others. But since the fatal period when protection was abandoned, this mutual dependence has been done away with--this great and beautiful bond of cohesion has been destroyed. We can no longer give "The Plough, the Sail, and the Loom," at any public dinner. Every one feels that the interests of these classes have now been set at variance. The old fable of the Sheaf of Arrows has been realised. _One_ arrow, marked "Protection to Native Industry," has been drawn out, and the whole sheaf is falling to pieces. It is not surprising that consequences so wide-spread and disastrous should follow the abandonment of the principle of protection to native industry; for it is the cement which alone has hitherto held together the vast and multifarious parts of the British empire. What was it, during the war, which retained all the colonies in steady and grateful loyalty to the British throne, and made even foreign colonial settlements hail with joy the pendants of our fleets fitted out for their subjugation, and in secret pray for the success of their enemy's arms? It was a sense of individual advantage--the consciousness that the Imperial Government on the throne knew no distinctions of locality, but distributed the same equal justice to the planter of Jamaica or the back-woodsman of Canada, as to the manufacturer of Manchester or the farmer of Yorkshire. All were anxious to gain admittance into the great and glorious empire, whose flaming sword, like that of the cherubim at the gate of Paradise, turned every way, and which extended to all its subjects, how distant and unrepresented soever, the same just and equal protection. Norway petitioned to be admitted into the great confederacy, and tendered its crown to Great Britain. Java mourned being shut out from it. The day when the British standard was withdrawn from the colonies, restored with imprudent generosity by victorious England at the peace of 1814, was to them one of universal mourning. There was no thought _then_ of breaking off from the British empire; no