No reader, it is believed, will complain that the last sentence is mysterious or obscure. Our manufacturers of cotton and woollen have of late loudly deplored the falling off of their home trade, while the consumption of intoxicating drink continues to increase. They believe that if the labouring classes spent less on the brewer and distiller, they would spend more on the clothier. The most fanatical devotee of alcohol cannot deny that too much of it is drunk, in face of the long-continued avowal of the judges that drink is by far the greatest cause of crime--drink, short of evident and provable drunkenness. Indeed, it is not from those who are outright drunk, but from those who have been drinking, that the worst and most numerous outrages come, while the foot and the eye are steady, though the brain and the passions are perverted. To boast and rejoice in the magnitude of the drink traffic, legal as it undoubtedly is, has no moral defence. The topic is here adduced, not in order to push that argument further, but in order to insist that the mere increase of a trade does not _in itself_ denote an increase of wealth; is not _in itself_ necessarily a thing to be applauded either by the economist or by the moralist. In each case we must look into detail, and consider whether this or that prosperous trade, like a huge weed in a garden, dwarfs or kills other growths, which, but for it, might thrive. An avowed ardent disciple of Mr. Cobden--a gentleman in some eminence of place and rank--has recently dissuaded taxes on wine and tobacco for the sake of revenue, _not_ on the ground which one might expect--viz., that a Government ought not to base a revenue on what may chance to be public vice, _but_ on the ground that "the grower of wine in France and of tobacco in America" can reasonably refuse to trade with us, if "we will not accept payment in _the only coin_ which he has to offer--namely, in his wine or his tobacco."[4] As if we were not competent to reply: "Of wine and tobacco we quickly get more than enough. Preserve your grapes in sawdust, or make them into raisins, and you will not find our people averse to enjoy them, nor will you encounter any unreasonable duty from our Custom-houses. As to tobacco, surely the rich land which alone can raise it, can raise no end of other products which we are certain to value." This well-informed writer, in his whole argument, seems to account wine the only food-product which we receive from France (to silks and elegant articles he once slightly alludes); but he cannot be ignorant that the solid food which France sends us in eggs, cheese, butter, vegetables, chickens, and dry fruit is enormous; she would in ordinary years send us wheat, did not America, Russia, and Australia make it needless. To speak of wine as _the only coin_ of France is a wonderful straining of argument. But the reason for quoting it here is to illustrate how completely the School of Cobden wishes the State to