The slaves of our modern landlords, merchants, and manufacturers are always the _apparent_ slaves of somebody else--of some wretched go-between underling, on whom the _odium_, though not the profits, of the system is made to fall. The landlord throws it upon the farmer or agent; the millowner, upon his overseer; the coal-king, upon his manager; the exporting merchant, upon the slop-shops and _sweaters_; and so on, throughout every ramification of trade and manufacture. The loanmonger retains not in his own hands his purchased privilege of rifling the pockets of all taxpayers twice a year for no value received. That would make his position as odious as that of Tacitus’s successful old German gamester would have been, had he made the “plucked pigeon” his personal slave, who was whilom his boon-companion and equal. Business could not go on in that way. Our loanmonger knows it, and, therefore, no sooner does he get his bonds than he diffuses the “scrip” as widely and plentifully as the dews of heaven, till there is hardly a grade or calling in society that is not made directly interested and instrumental in enslaving the producer and defrauding him of his hire. At the moment we write, there are nearly a quarter of a million of families interested in what is called “public faith,” “national honour,” and all that sort of thing; and, amongst the whole lot, there is not one that was originally concerned in any of the hocus-pocusing transactions which have given us our “national debt,” with its thirty millions of annual tax on the producing slaves of this country. The original loanmongers and their representatives have dexterously shifted the odium and the responsibility of their black job or jobs (for there were many of them) from their own shoulders to those, of innocent parties; and, whatever may eventually become of these parties, they took good care to have more than their _quid pro quo_ before they transferred their claims upon the public purse to the present recipients of the dividends payable half-yearly on account of the debt called “national.” Another and, mayhap, a stronger analogy to the case of Tacitus’s “plucked pigeons,” sold into slavery, might be found in the expatriated tenantry and peasantry of Ireland. The landlords of that country do not _always_ dispose of their human chattels by plague, pestilence, and famine; and there is no law of the Twelve Tables to authorise the cutting up of the bodies of their tenants in arrear. But there is a law--or, whether there is or not, they find one--which authorises them to eject tenants from their holdings, to raze their habitations to the ground, and to drive the said tenants, homeless and breadless, to find a shelter and a crust where they may. In such cases (and they are as plentiful as blackberries), it is not unusual for such landlords to smuggle their ousted victims out of the country, and even to pay their freight to Canada in some crazy old hull (provided their fare do not exceed the