fields half tilled and full of stumps, its snake fences, and the charred pines which stand up gaunt monuments of forest fires--are impressed, I might almost say ravished, by the sight of the lovely garden which unlimited wealth expended on a limited space has made of England. This country, too, has an immense capital invested in the funds and securities of foreign nations, and in this way draws tribute from the world, though, unhappily, we are being made sensible of the fact that money lent to a foreign government is lent to a debtor on whom you cannot distrain. But the sources of this fabulous prosperity, are they inexhaustible? In part, we may hope they are. A maritime position, admirably adapted for trading with both hemispheres, a race of first- rate seamen, masses of skilled labour, vast accumulations of machinery and capital--these are advantages not easily lost. And there is still in England good store of coal and iron. Not so stable, however, is the advantage given to England by the effects of the Napoleonic war, which for the time crushed all manufactures and mercantile marines but hers. Now, the continental nations are developing manufactures and mercantile marines of their own. You go round asking them to alter their tariffs, so as to enable you to recover their markets, and almost all of them refuse; about the only door you have really succeeded in getting opened to you is that of France, and this was opened, not by the nation, but by an autocrat, who had diplomatic purposes of his own. The _Times_, indeed, in a noteworthy article the other day, undertook to prove that a great manufacturing and trading nation might lose its customers without being much the worse for it, but this seems too good to be true; I fancy Yorkshire and Lancashire would say so. Is it not that very margin of profit of which _The Times_ speaks so lightly, which, being accumulated, has created the wealth of England? Your manufacturers are certainly under the impression that they want markets, and the loss of the great American market seems to them a special matter of concern. It is doubtful whether that market would be restored to them even by an alteration of the tariff. The coal in the great American coal fields is much nearer the surface, and consequently more cheaply worked, than the coal in England; iron is as plentiful, and it is near the coal; labour, which has been much dearer there, is now falling to the English level. Tariff or no tariff, America will probably keep her own market for the heavier and coarser goods. But there is still a kind of goods, in the production of which the old country will long have a great advantage. I mean the lighter, finer, and more elegant goods, the products of cultivated taste and of trained skill in design--that very kind of goods, in short, the character of which these Schools of Art are specially intended to improve. Industry and invention the new world has