within rose by half-inches and eighth-parts--stood sure. But the river is now high in flood--the waters are toppling over--the yielding masonry has begun to bulge and crack. The Queen's Speech, when we consider it as emanating from a Conservative Ministry, indicates a tremendous flaw; the speech of Sir Robert Peel betrays an irreparable bulge; the sudden conversions to free-trade principles of officials and place-holders show a general outpouring at opening rents and crannies: depend on it, Protectionists, your dam-dyke, patch or prop it as you please, is on the eve of destruction; yet a very little longer, and it will be hurtling down the stream. For what purpose, do we say? Simply in the hope of awakening to a sense of their true interest, ere it be too late, a class of the Scottish people in which we feel deeply interested,--we mean the tenant agriculturists of the kingdom. They have in this all-important crisis a battle to fight; and if they do not fight and win it, they will be irrevocably ruined by hundreds and thousands. The great Protectionist battle--the battle in which they may make common cause with their landlords if they will, against the League, and the Free-Trade Whigs, and Sir Robert Peel, and Adam Smith, and the Queen--is a battle in which to a certainty they will be beat. They may protract the contest long enough to get so thoroughly wearied as to be no longer fit for the other great battle which awaits them; but they may depend on it as one of the surest things in all the future, that they will have to record a disastrous issue. They _must_ be defeated. We would fain ask them--for it is sad to see men spending their strength to no end--to look fairly at the aspect things are beginning to wear, and the ever-extending front which is arraying against them. We would ask them first to peruse those chapters in Adam Smith which in reality form the standing-ground of their opponents,--chapters whose solid basis of economic philosophy has made anti-corn-law agitation and anti-corn-law tracts and speeches such formidable things. We would ask them next to look at the progress of the League, at its half-million fund, its indomitable energy and ever-growing influence. We would then ask them to look at the recent conversions of Whig and Tory to free-trade principles, at the resignation of Sir Robert Peel, and the proof the country received in consequence, that in the present extremity there is no other pilot prepared to take the helm; at the strangely marked Adam Smith cast of the Queen's Speech; and at the telling facts of Sir Robert's explanatory statement. We request them to take a cool survey of all these things, and to cogitate for themselves the issue which they so clearly foretell. It seems as certain that free-trade principles are at last to be established in Britain, as that there is a sun in the sky. Nor does there seem much wisdom in fighting a battle that is inevitably to be lost. The battle which it is their