Fortunately for my peace I found, on reading a little further, that this is not Britannia as she is, but Britannia seen by you, “as in a glass darkly”—as she is to be—when some more of her blood has been sucked by a phlebotomising Oligarchy and State-pensionary; by an ogreish Cotton lordocracy; by a sanguinary East India Company, whose “atrocious greediness caused ten millions of Indians to perish in a month;” by the servile Parsonocracy, who “read their sermons, in order that the priest may be able to place his discourse before the magistrate, if he should be suspected of having preached anything contrary to law;” by the Landlords, whose oppressions cause labourers to kill one another “to get a premium upon death;” and by a variety of other national leeches, which your imagination presents to our view with the distinctness of the monsters in a drop of Thames water seen through a solar microscope. But, Sir, as Mr. Hammer said, “to think that a man may be almost murdered without knowing it!” and so, _I_ say, (one trial of your book will prove the fact) may a whole parish—such as Tooting—or an entire country—such as England. If it had not been for your book I should not have had the remotest notion that “English society is about to fall with a fearful crash.” Society at large, so far as I can observe it (at Tooting, and elsewhere), seems to be quite innocent of its impending fate; and if one may judge from appearances (but then you say, we may not),—we are rather better off than usual just now: indeed, when you paint Britannia as she is at the present writing, she makes a rather fat and jolly portrait than otherwise. In your “Exposition” (for 1850) you say: “The problem is not to discover whether England is great, but whether her greatness can endure.” In admitting, in the handsomest manner possible, that England _is_ great, you go on to say, that “Great Britain, which is only two hundred leagues long, and whose soil is far from equal to that of Aragon or Lombardy, draws every year from its agriculture, by a skilful cultivation and the breeding of animals, a revenue which amounts to more than three billions six hundred millions francs, and this revenue of the mother-country is almost doubled by the value of similar produce in its colonies and dependencies. Her industry, her commerce, and her manufactures, create a property superior to the primal land-productions, and all owing to her inexhaustible mines, her natural wealth, and her admirable system of circulation by fourscore and six canals, and seventy lines of railway. The total revenue of England then amounts to upwards of twelve billion francs. Her power amongst the nations is manifest by the number and greatness of her fleets and of her domains. In Europe she possesses, besides her neighbour-islets, Heligoland, Gibraltar, Malta, and the Ionian Islands; in Asia, she holds British Hindostan with its tributaries, Ceylon, and her compulsory