their very kinsmen and relatives--that they had forsaken their cultivated farms, their lands and possessions, to take up their abode with their families in a wilderness; remembering these circumstances, it need excite no surprise that the old colonial commercial system was allowed to continue without any very weighty remonstrance from the colonists, until it expired in Britain's free trade policy. Although that same system, primarily intended for Britain's benefit, was not calculated to advance the settlement, the improvement, or the wealth of Canada, with equal rapidity to that of the adjoining country, whose inhabitants enacted their own commercial regulations with a view to their own immediate benefit and without reference to that of others. The United States had legislated solely for their own interests. Our commercial legislation, instead of consulting exclusively our good, had been directed for the benefit of England. If that same policy were continued hereafter, to overtake our neighbours would be hopeless, and he reiterated that the consequences would be fatal to our connexion with Great Britain. We must protect the industry of our country. The people of this country surely are the first entitled to the benefits of the markets of their country. He had been brought up a commercial man, and until lately held to the free trade principles of commercial men. From his youth, Smith's "Wealth of Nations" had been almost as familiar to him as his Catechism, and was regarded with almost equal deference; but practical experience had of late forced upon him the conviction, that that beautiful theory was not borne out by corresponding benefits; he had looked at its practical results, and was constrained to acknowledge, in spite of early predilections, that that theory was a fallacy. He had adopted the views of the American Protectionists as those most consonant with sound reason and common sense. Their arguments he looked upon as unanswerable; with them he believed that economists and free trade advocates had overlooked three principles which to him appeared like economic laws of nature, and the disregard of which alone was sufficient to account for the present position of our country. They say, and he believed with them, that the earth, the only source of all production, requires the refuse of its products to be returned to its soil, or productiveness diminishes and eventually ceases. That the expense of carriage to distant markets not only wastes the manure of animals on the road, but that the expenses of freight and commissions, of charges to carriers and exchangers, are in themselves a _waste_, avoided by a home market whenever the _consumer_ is not separated from the _producer_; and that those productions fitted for distant