watch the progress of the surrounding misery, and impatiently await its completion; more cruel than vultures, since covered with the aegis that has unnerved the force and paralysed the energies of their neighbours, they introduce themselves into the midst of the havoc of their own species, and prey upon the living victims who are sinking around them. And here, it may not be inexpedient to reconcile the existence of so much distress, with so large an income, and so small a population as the colony and its dependent settlements are known to possess. The former, it has been seen, may be estimated in round numbers at L170,000, the latter at 20,000 souls: so that if the annual income were equally divided among the entire population, and they were all agriculturists, and could furnish themselves with food, (I make this supposition, because it is at their option to become agriculturists, and it is consequently a legitimate inference, that it is not the interest of such as have not embraced this alteration to do so) they would each have man, woman, and child, 8l. 10s. yearly for the purchase of articles of foreign growth and manufacture alone. This I am ready to allow, is comparatively a much larger sum than could be appropriated by the inhabitants of this country to similar purposes; and it would therefore appear on the first view, incompatible with the doleful picture of distress which I have drawn. If, however, the remoteness of the colony from England, India, and China, the three principal supplying countries, be duly considered, and the great expence of freight and insurance unavoidably attached to so long a navigation, an expence which in the first of these instances, is augmented in a two-fold degree, by the entire absence of return cargoes; if it be stated that these local disadvantages alone, render it impossible for the importers to dispose of their merchandize for less than fifty per cent. on the prime cost to their immediate purchasers, and that at least three fourths of the population are obliged from the want of ready money, to buy on long credits of these secondary agents, who fashion their prices according to the nature and extent of their customers' embarrassments, sometimes contenting themselves with a second advance of fifty per cent.; but more frequently affixing to their goods a profit of a hundred, a hundred and fifty, and two hundred per cent.: if it be recollected how far these grievous exactions are aggravated by the system of vassalage just described, a system which places all the unfortunate wretches who are reduced to it at the absolute mercy of their rapacious landlords; if the profligate and improvident habits and disposition of the generality of the colonists be taken into the estimate, and their total disregard of order and economy in their domestic arrangements; but above all, if their unfortunate propensity to the excessive use of spirituous liquors be superadded; a propensity which like Aaron's