Let us continue to extend our foreign intercourse and home cultivation—let the merchant legislate in affairs of trade—the landholder in country matters; each in that in which his judgment has been formed by experience, acting always on the principle that the general prosperity of the country is the interest {133} of every class—that, like the branch and the root, their prosperity is indissolubly combined. When we view the advantages of Britain—almost to a wish,—when we view her able and ready to supply the necessities of man in every clime, in exchange for his superfluities, and to scatter science, morality, the arts of life, all that conduces to happiness and improvement over the nations,—when we view all this, being blasted by an exclusive system of monopoly, of very doubtful advantage to one party of the nation, and tyrannically oppressive upon all others, can we refrain from execration? We would desire the casuist to draw a distinction between the criminality of preventing the operative from exchanging the produce of his labour (otherwise unsaleable) for cheap food[31], when his family is famishing; and compelling the labour of the Negro (whom you support with food) with the whip. Men will be found of a virtue sufficiently easy to advocate either system. We only wish that the supporters of {134} monopoly and their abettors were sent off to some separate quarter of the world with all their beloved restrictions, duties, tariffs, passports, revenue officers, blockade men, with the innumerable petty interfering vexatious regulations, and all the contrivances which surely the devil has invented to repress industry and promote misery, where they might form an Elysium of their own. There is nothing more certain, should we by restrictions continue to banish knowledge, capital, and industry from our shores[32], than that the Genius of Improvement will fix upon some other place for the seat of her throne. _Maritime dominion_ will follow in her train; and on the first war, all exportation of the products of our manufacturers being at an end, unexampled misery will involve four-fifths of our population, and an explosion will ensue, from its origin and character of unparalleled fury, which will sweep to destruction the insane authors of the calamity—tear to shreds the whole fabric of society—and give to the winds all the institutions which man has been accustomed to revere. {135} * * * * *