[Page Head: DISTURBED STATE OF THE COUNTRY.] Another year gone, taking along with it some particles of health, strength, and spirits, but it is to be hoped making us something wiser and better, and giving an increased power of passive resistance to bear up against the accumulating ills or sorrows of life. But I will not--here at least--plunge into a moralising strain. As to public matters the year opens in no small gloom and uncertainty. On the surface all is bright and smooth enough: the country is powerful, peaceful, and prosperous, and all the elements of wealth and power are increasing; but the mind of the mass is disturbed and discontented, and there is a continual fermentation going on, and separate and unconnected causes of agitation and disquiet are in incessant operation, which create great alarm, but which there seems to exist no power of checking or subduing. The Government is in a wretched state of weakness, utterly ignorant whether it can scramble through the session, unable to assume a dignified attitude, to investigate with calm deliberation the moral and political condition of the country, and to act upon its convictions with firmness and resolution, tottering and staggering between one great party and one fierce faction, and just able to keep on its legs because both are, for different reasons, willing to wound but afraid to strike. It does not fulfil the purpose of a Government, and brings the function itself into contempt by accustoming men to look at it without any feeling of attachment or respect. Wild notions of political grievances and political rights have been widely disseminated among the masses, and these are not engendered or fostered by the prevalence of distress or that want of employment which not unnaturally turns the thoughts of the idle and unoccupied to the most desperate expedients for bettering their condition, but they are the mere aspirings of a fierce democracy who have been gradually but deeply impregnated with sentiments of hatred and jealousy of the upper classes, and with a determination to 'level' all political distinctions and privileges, and when this is accomplished to proceed to a more equal distribution of property, to an agrarian experiment; for it is idle to suppose that men of this stamp care anything for abstract political theories, or have any definite object but that of procuring the means of working less, and eating and drinking more. The accounts of the Chartists (as they are called), at and about Manchester, represent them to be collected in vast bodies, associations of prodigious numbers, meeting in all the public-houses, collecting arms universally, and constantly practising by firing at a mark, openly threatening, if their demands are not complied with, to enforce them by violence. In the mean time there is no military force in the country at all adequate to meet these menacing demonstrations; the yeomanry have been reduced, and the