And yet, though many of the seeds which this great work served to scatter sprung up thus rapidly, and produced luxuriant crops, there were others, not less instinct with the vital principles, of which the germination has been slow. The nurseryman expects, in sowing beds of the stone-fruit-bearing trees, such as the plum or the hawthorn, to see the plants spring up very irregularly. One seed bursts the enveloping case, and gets up in three weeks; another barely achieves the same work in three years. And it has been thus with the harder-coated germens of the _Wealth of Nations_. It is now exactly eighty years since the philosopher set himself to elaborate the thinking of his great work in his mother's house in Kirkcaldy, and exactly seventy years since he gave it to the world. It appeared in 1776; and now, for the first time, in 1846, the Queen's Speech, carefully concocted by a Conservative Ministry, embodies as great practical truths its free-trade principles. The shoot--a true dicotyledon--has fairly got its two vigorous lobes above the surface: freedom of trade in all that the farmer rears, and freedom of trade in all that the manufacturer produces; and there cannot be a shadow of doubt that it will be by and by a very vigorous tree. No Protectionist need calculate, from its rate of progress in the past, on its rate of progress in the future. Nearly three generations have come and gone since, to vary the figure, the preparations for laying the train began; but now that the train is fairly ready and fired, the explosion will not be a matter of generations at all. Explosions come under an entirely different law from the law of laying trains. It will happen with the rising of the free-trade agitation as with the rising of water against a dam-head stretched across a river. Days and weeks may pass, especially if droughts have been protracted and the stream low, during which the rising of the water proves to be a slow, silent, inefficient sort of process, of half-inches and eighth-parts; but when the river gets into flood,--when the vast accumulation begins to topple over the dam-dyke,--when the dyke itself begins to swell, and bulge, and crack, and to disgorge, at its ever-increasing flaws and openings, streams of turbid water,--let no one presume to affirm that the after-process is to be slow. In mayhap one minute more, in a few minutes at most, stones, sticks, turf, the whole dam-dyke, in short, but a dam-dyke no longer, will be roaring adown the stream, wrapped up in the womb of an irresistible wave. Now there have been palpable openings, during the last few months, in the Protectionist dam-head. We pointed years since to the rising of the water, and predicted that it would prevail at last. But the droughts were protracted, and the river low. Good harvests and brisk trade went hand in hand together; and the Protectionist dam-head--though feeble currents and minute waves beat against it, and the accumulation