We would not damp the sympathy which is felt for the enslaved _producer_ of sugar in Brazil; but we would claim some portion of that sympathy on behalf of the toil-worn _consumer_ at home. The Lancashire operatives, starving in our midst, have ties on us which we must not and cannot overlook. Let their case be considered—let their prayers be heard. Let justice be done to them. They are our brethren, and their case is ours. Let us seek for them the abolition of all monopoly—for one does but involve another—they are all the results of the same impure system—they all stand and fall together. In every country under heaven the friends of the people are ranged on the one side, and their foes and the friends of monopoly on the other. If a monopoly of legislation had never existed at home, a monopoly of trade would never have existed in favour of any colony or nation under the sun. Let the legislative monopoly continue, and we shall not only peril our trade abroad, but our very existence at home, and England’s glory shall vanish as a dream. All that has been written by historians, and said by orators, and sung by poets, of a nation’s gradual decline and ignominious extinction, shall we realise in her hapless fate. The Mayor of Liverpool, at a public meeting there, was heard to say, that our legislators were gentlemen. Whether this was said ironically, or otherwise, we know not. The assertion certainly contains a great deal of truth. We cannot look at one single act of theirs without finding it full of blunders and bulls. By their own folly we lost half our American market. Brazil, the fourth foreign market we have, we are about to lose. Our artizans are overworked to raise annually four or five million pounds’ worth of goods, which are then taken, and, as it were, drowned in the bottom of the sea. What a man might have for once buying, the legislature, in its wisdom, makes him pay for twice. It decrees that a man must toil all day for that which he might otherwise have for half a day’s work. What admirable policy! Blessed are its effects, in the misery it has shed over the homes of our operatives—in the life-blood it has wrung from the labourer’s heart! It is time that whatever of manhood there is left in this Saxon and once happy land—whatever of stern valour that once distinguished us from the nations of the earth, and which the struggle for the pittance that barely keeps up life has not frittered away, or which the Union House has not starved out—should arouse and join in that cry which demands that man’s rights should be given back to him—that his serfdom be abolished—that his brotherhood be owned—that England should no longer be one vast poor-house—that life should no longer be a source of sorrow, but of joy—no longer what priestism and class legislation have made it, a thing to be feared and shunned, but a boon to be desired—that that should be a blessing, which in times past, was a bitter curse.