Considering their patriotic despondency in regard to the utterly hopeless condition of the nation, it is wonderful to observe the contented complacency with which these gentlemen eat their filberts and sip their claret. Neither is this stoic philosophy confined to them alone. All sorts of predicted want and impending misery are borne with exemplary fortitude by all sorts of Englishmen. The skilful artisan seldom allows a week to pass without deploring the inadequacy of wages; but, although he manages to get a good Sunday’s dinner some fifty times a year, and once or twice in the twelvemonth indulges his family with a healthful pleasure trip in the country, he is able to scrape up a few pounds in the savings’ bank. Yet if you ask him touching the state of things in his particular line, he will tell you that “Times never were so bad.” So universally is the propensity to depreciate things as they are, that if a commission were appointed to inquire into the state of the nation, their report, if derived solely from the evidence of well-to-do witnesses, would be lugubrious in the extreme. It is only the very poor who gaze cheerfully into the future; for their existence is a condition of hope. They apprehend nothing, for they have nothing to lose; whatever change fortune may bring, must be, they believe, for the better. Happily, better testimony, to the real condition of the industrious classes is producible than that dark cloud of witnesses who speak out of the fulness of an Englishman’s privilege—grumbling. That testimony has been lucidly sifted, and was adduced by Mr. G. R. Porter at the recent meeting of the British Association in Edinburgh. It consisted—in proof of the well-being and continued progress of our country—of a comparison between the income tax returns in respect of incomes derived from trades and professions in 1812, and the like returns in 1848, excluding from the former period the incomes below one hundred and fifty pounds; which, under the existing law, are allowed to pass untaxed. The total amount thus assessed, after deducting exemptions, was, in 1812, about twenty-one millions and a quarter; while, in 1848, the amount was nearly fifty-seven millions; showing an increase, in thirty-six years, of about thirty-five millions and three-quarters, or one hundred and sixty-eight per cent.; being at the rate of upwards of four and a half per cent., yearly:—an increase very nearly three-fold greater than the increase during the same period of the population of Great Britain; where, alone, the income tax flourishes in full bloom.