wrong course, immediately abandon it for the right. * * * * * In the preceding pages we have endeavoured to advocate Free Trade, as the only one thing by which slavery can be destroyed. We now come to a subject of equal importance—the claims of our countrymen at home. We plead not for the Manchester warehouseman, cribbed, cabined, and confined by our wretched system of commercial policy, but we plead for the overtaxed and under-fed hard-working men and women of Great Britain. It is well to be tenderly alive to the concerns of the West Indian negro, but the charity that exhausts itself on them partakes of the same mongrel character as that sensibility which sheds floods of tears over the feigned distresses of the stage, and looks unmoved upon the miseries of a world. A reduction in the price of sugar would most certainly be an inestimable boon to the working man. Such a step taken by government would produce no increase in the consumption of sugar on the part of the middle or higher classes, but it would enable the poorer classes at once to use one of the most nutritious and essential articles of food. If you would preserve a man from drunkenness, make his home happy; let him have something better than the meagre fare which too generally awaits him. On the government which, by its interference, deprives the operative of the fair fruit of his labour, which drives him to the alehouse, to avoid the home rendered wretched by their accursed agency, rest the blame and guilt occasioned by the degradation and destruction of the body and soul of man. Different is the judgment of Heaven from that of the world. Could our voice reach the ears of our senators, we would ask them to pause ere they continued in a course of legislation which has been a fruitful source of vice—a course of legislation which, like the destroying angel, has spread death through the land. We would say to them, “Law-makers, see there the wretched slave of vice; the fault is not his, but yours. From your costly clubs, from your glittering saloons, flushed with revelry and wine, you have gone to the House, and, in the fulness of your power and pride, declared that his hearth should be desolate—that the crust he gnaws he should earn at the price of his life—that misery and want, like attendant handmaids, should follow on his steps; and if he has shrunk abashed from their presence—if his heart has failed him in the hour of need—if he has forgotten his manhood and his immortality—if he has joined in the hideous orgies of the drunken and the desolate—if he has sunk into the condition of the beast—the crime, and shame, and curse, be yours. And you may well shudder with an unwonted fear at the thought of the hour when Heaven shall require an account at your hands—when it shall be asked you why you laid on your brother a burden greater than he could bear, and why you blotted out the image of divinity that was planted there.”