Rocky Mountains; the mighty day of four thousand years was drawing to its close; but before its light was extinguished in the West, civilisation had returned to the land of its birth; and ere its orb had set in the waves of the Pacific, the sun of knowledge was illuminating the isles of the Eastern Sea. Great and important as have been these results of the social convulsions of France and England in the first instance, they sink into insignificance compared to those which have followed the change in the commercial policy and increased stringency of the monetary laws of Great Britain. The effect of these all-important measures, from which so much was expected, and so little, save suffering, has been received, has been to augment to an extraordinary and unparalleled degree the _outward_ tendency of the British people. The agricultural population, especially in Ireland, has been violently torn up from the land of its birth by woeful suffering; a famine of the thirteenth appeared amidst the population of the nineteenth century; and to this terrible but transient source of suffering has been superadded the lasting discouragement arising from the virtual closing of the market of England to Irish produce, by the inundations of grain from foreign states. Since the barriers raised by human regulations have been thrown down, the eternal laws of nature have appeared in full operation; the old and rich state can always undersell the young and poor one in manufactures, and is always under-sold by it in agricultural produce. The fate of old Rome apparently is reserved for Great Britain; the harvests of Poland, the Ukraine, and America, prostrate agriculture in the British Isles as effectually as those of Sicily, Libya, and Egypt did the old Patrimony of the Legions; and after the lapse of eighteen hundred years the same effects appear. The great cities flourish, but the country decays; the exportation of human beings and the importation of human food keep up a gainful traffic in the seaport towns; but it is every day more and more gliding into the hands of the foreigner; and while exports and imports are constantly increasing, the mainstay of national strength, the cultivation of the soil, is rapidly declining. The effects upon the strength, resources, and population of the empire, and the growth of its colonial possessions, have been equally important. Europe, before the middle of the century, beholds with astonishment Great Britain, which, at the end of the war, had been self-supporting, importing ten millions of quarters of grain, being a full fifth of the national subsistence, and a constant stream of three hundred thousand emigrants annually leaving its shores. Its inhabitants, which for four centuries had been constantly increasing, have declined a million in the last five years in the two islands, and two millions in Ireland, taken separately; but the foundations of a vast empire have been laid in the Transatlantic and Australian