allies of the Punjab and of Scinde—that is to say, almost a world; in Africa she claims Sierra Leone with its dependencies, the Isle of France, Seychelles, Fernandez Po, the Cape of Good Hope and Saint Helena; in America, she possesses Upper and Lower Canada, Cape Breton, the Lesser Antilles, the Bermudas, Newfoundland, Lucays, Jamaica, Dominica, Guiana, the Bay of Honduras, and Prince Edward’s Island; lastly, in Oceania, she has Van Dieman’s Land, Norfolk Island, Nova Scotia, Southern Australia; and these hundred nations make up for her more that one hundred and fifty millions of subjects, including the twenty-seven to twenty-eight millions of the three mother kingdoms. As to her mercantile marine, two details will suffice to make it known; she has about thirty thousand sailing-vessels and steamers, without counting her eight thousand colonial ships; and in one year she exports six or seven hundred millions of cotton stuffs, which makes for a single detail an account beyond the sum total of all the manufacturing exportation of France.” But now for the plague spot! All this territory, and power, and commercial activity is, you say, our ruin; all this wealth is precisely our pauperism; all this happiness is our misery. What Montesquieu says, and you Mr. Ledru Rollin indorse with your unerring imprimatur, _must_ be true:—“The fortune of maritime empires cannot be long, for they only reign by the oppression of the nations, and while they extend themselves abroad, they are undermining themselves within.” Upon my word, Mr. Rollin, this looks very likely: and when you see your neighbours gaily promenading Regent Street; when you hear of the “Lion of Waterloo” (at whom you are so obliging as to say in your Preface, you have no wish “to fire a spent ball”) giving his usual anniversary dinner to the usual number of guests, and with his usual activity stepping off afterwards to a ball; when you are told that a hundred thousand Londoners can afford to enjoy themselves at Epsom Races; and that throughout the country there is just now more enjoyment and less grumbling than there has been for years, I can quite understand that your horror at the innocent disregard thus evinced at the tremendous “blow up” that is coming, must be infinitely more real than that of Serjeant Flamfacer. “Alas!” you exclaim with that “profound emotion” with which your countrymen are so often afflicted; “Government returns inform me that during the past year English pauperism has decreased eleven per cent., and that the present demand for labour in the manufacturing districts nearly equals the supply? The culminating point is reached; destruction must follow!”