"That in thus declaring, as your petitioners do, their conviction of the impolicy and injustice of the restrictive system, and in desiring every practicable relaxation of it, they have in view only such parts of it as are not connected, or are only subordinately so, with the public revenue. As long as the necessity for the present amount of revenue subsists, your petitioners cannot expect so important a branch of it as the customs to be given up, nor to be materially diminished, unless some substitute less objectionable be suggested. But it is against every restrictive regulation of trade, not essential to the revenue, against all duties merely protective from foreign competition, and against the excess of such duties as are partly for the purpose of revenue, and partly for that of protection, that the prayer of the present petition is respectfully submitted to the wisdom of parliament. “May it therefore, &c.” In order to see how extensively and how effectually governments have interfered to pervert the natural distribution of the gifts of Providence, it would be necessary to review almost the whole list of spontaneous and artificial productions; for there are few or none whose spread has not been arbitrarily stopped in one direction or another. What Great Britain alone,—the most enlightened of commercial countries,—has done in damming up the streams of human enjoyment, is fearful to think of. In the vineyards of France and Portugal, the grapes have been trodden to waste, and the vinedressers’ children have gone half clothed, because wines were not permitted to be brought in, and cottons and woollens were thereby forbidden to be carried out, at their natural cost. During the long series of years that good tea has been a too costly drink for many thousands of our population, they would have been glad of the refreshment of chocolate, in some of its various preparations, if Spain had been permitted to send it to us from her colonies as cheap as Spain was willing to afford it. But the article has been loaded with a duty amounting to from 100 to 230 per cent.; so that few but the rich could ever taste it; and they have been swallowing a curious compound of the nut, flour, and Castile soap. The silkworms of Italy would have wrought as busily for England as for France, if England had not been jealous of France, and thereby injured her own manufacture. England is wiser now, and new myriads of worms are hanging their golden balls on the mulberry trees, while the neighbouring peasantry are enjoying the use of our hardware, and looms are kept busy in Spitalfields. Time was when the northern nations welcomed our manufactures in return for their timber and iron of prime quality: but now, the ship and house-builders must pay higher for worse wood from Canada; and we have laid exorbitant duties on foreign iron, in order to encourage mining at home. The good people of Sweden and Norway, having nothing to offer us but