large proportion of the remaining parts), flourished beyond all former example. The manufacturing system supplied the war with men as well as means; the necessity for hands in agriculture also being greatly diminished by improved modes of labour, and by the use of agricultural machines, we were enabled without violence or difficulty to maintain in arms a force scarcely inferior in numbers to that of the enemy with all their fivefold superiority of population. And thus the country was prevented from feeling the evil of that forced population which the manufacturing system and the poor laws had produced, and of the prevailing custom of educating youths of the middle rank for stations higher than that in which they were born, or had means to support. ♦WEAKNESS OF THE GOVERNMENT.♦ In resources therefore for maintaining war, the British government had never been so strong: and so far as Buonaparte reckoned upon our financial difficulties, and the want of men to resist him whenever and wherever he should bring his overwhelming force against us, he deceived himself, as much as when he supposed it possible to intimidate the British nation. But he reckoned also upon the weakness of our government, the aid which would be given him by a licentious press, and the progress of those insane opinions which lead to revolution and ruin. His councils were directed by a single will steadily to one end; and whatever he undertook was vigorously pursued, and with means proportioned to the object so as to render success certain, as far as depended upon well-concerted plans, adequate preparations, and military strength. But the constitution of a British cabinet, in which contrarious opinions are reconciled by concessions and compromises, seemed in time of war to insure vacillation and weakness. The whole conduct of the war had confirmed him in this judgement, which the history of all our wars since the days of Marlborough exemplifies. Every administration, this like the last, and the last like that before it, treading one after another in the same sheep-track of fatuity, proceeded without system, and with no other views than such as the chance and changes of the hour presented. Setting sail before the wind from whatever quarter it happened to blow, they steered a driftless course, though the shallows lay full before them. The same tardiness, the same indecision, the same half measures, the same waste of men and money in nugatory expeditions, had characterized them all. Moreover the government itself had been weakened by the concessions which faction, ever active and ever alert, had extorted from a series of feeble ministers during this long reign. At a time when discontent was at its height at the close of the American war, the House of Commons passed a resolution that the power of the Crown had increased, was increasing, and ought to be diminished; a resolution that carried with it its own refutation, being itself a decisive proof of the weakness