There can be no freedom nor safety, much less prosperity, for any people till they obtain just laws to regulate landed tenures, credit, and commercial interchange. With such laws there could not exist a bad government, nor would oppression in any form be possible. Without such laws there cannot be a good government, be its form, its administration, its institutes, or its franchises what they may. Land, and whatever else the Deity has made for man’s use, must be expropriated, by commutation, on equitable terms for the general good, and never again be made private property. Credit must be accessible for every member of the community, on terms beneficial for the individual, and just and safe for the public. And all commerce must be gradually, reduced to equitable exchange on the principle of equal values for equal values, measured by a labour or corn standard. Under the systems of Landed Tenures, Currency, and Commerce which at present prevail in England and in France, it is no exaggeration to say, that those who live upon _rents_, _profits_, _usury_, _discounts_, _dividends_, _commissions_, _fees_, etc., absorb from 300 to 350 million pounds sterling worth of the people’s produce in each country every year, over and above what they give the people any value whatever for, in money or service of any appreciable kind. In fact, for this enormous annual drain the useful classes of both countries receive no consideration whatever. It is sheer robbery, disguised under plausible names and forms. The Seven Propositions of the National Reform League present what would seem the only feasible means of ridding the country of this crushing incubus, consistent with acknowledging legal rights and vested interests. Unless some such compromise be agreed on between rich and poor, both in England and in France, a convulsion, sooner or later, that will engulf both, must be the inevitable consequence. No country could long sustain two such existing drains by the idle and baneful classes upon the laborious producers--drains equal to from 300 to 350 millions every year in each country--without at last collapsing after protracted agonies to preserve national life. The system of equitable Exchange substituted for the present nefarious one of profitmongering would save the _souls_ as well as the _bodies_ of both nations; but _that_ is absolutely impossible without such antecedent laws on Land and Currency as we have pointed out.