crificed, better, far better, abandon the increase of your foreign exports, than consign your wooden walls to destruction. We have manufacturers and artisans, with their inevitable attendants of public demoralization, Trades' Unions, and democratic fervour in abundance! What we want, is such an increase in our maritime resources as may keep pace with the rapid strides which other nations are making in that particular. We take our stand on the principles of Adam Smith, that there are occasions on which the principles of free trade must yield to the higher considerations of public safety and national independence; that the Navigation Laws were framed, accidentally or designedly, it matters not, with consummate wisdom for that purpose; and that nothing short of the blockade of the Thames and the Medway, by an enemy's fleet, the burning of our arsenals at Portsmouth and Plymouth, a disaster as great as the Nile or Trafalgar was to our enemies, should have made us resign what was our main security for the sceptre of the ocean.

That is the

The deplorable thing now is, that foreign shipping is so rapidly encroaching upon British in the commerce of the United Kingdom, that every addition to our exports and imports, so far from adding to our national strength, is a direct subtraction from it, and is so much gained to the forces which are ultimately to be turned against us. decisive circumstance. So rapid is the growth, under the reciprocity system, of foreign shipping in our own harbours, that it is easy to foresee the time when they will have obtained a decisive superiority over our own; and when, on the first rupture, or the first maritime disaster, the naval forces which we have nursed in our bosom, will at once be arrayed against us. This is the inevitable fate of a great and old commercial state, when it does not maintain, by positive regulations, exclusive advantages to its own shipping, because the high taxes, duties, and wages of labour, with which such a community necessarily becomes burdened, render it an easy matter for the shipping of younger and less embarrassed states to undersell it in the transport of goods; and thus, in the conflict, its own shipping is

gradually ousted; and, amidst the prosperity of every other class, the sinews of its national defence are rapidly and irretrievably withered. Twenty or thirty years of such a progress, are amply sufficient to prostrate the strength of the greatest naval power in existence; or rather, to transfer the vehicles of its foreign commerce to its enemies, and hand over to foreign powers the instruments of its national subjugation. When once the corner has been turned-when once the foreign shipping which it employs has come to equal its own, it stands on the unstable equilibrium, and the slightest stroke will produce an overthrow. Like Charles XII., or Napoleon, it has taught its enemies how to conquer it; it has placed in their hands the means of its own destruction. An Egospotamos, a Pultawa, a Leipsic, may in a day array the forces it has nourished in its bosom, against its existence.

These apprehensions will not appear chimerical to those who consider how rapidly all the greatest maritime empires recorded in history have been prostrated; how instantaneously the sceptre of the ocean slipped from the hands of Athens, Tyre, Venice, Portugal, and Holland. Far more rapid than the decay of a great military state, is the fall of such naval powers; a single disaster overwhelms them; they find themselves suddenly blockaded in their harbours. The world cannot want carriers, and the whole naval resources on which their greatness formerly depended, is at once transferred to their enemies. Such dangers are unavoidable, and naturally incident to that species of dominion. But we have anticipated the stroke; voluntarily transferred the sinews of strength to our enemies; with our own hands trained up the naval force which is one day to be the instru ment of our destruction.

Vain are the hopes of maintaining any thing like prosperity to this country, if our naval superiority is at an end. The British oak constitutes the bond which holds together the scattered parts of this mighty dominion. The instant it is dissolved, the splendid fabric will fall to pieces; our possessions in every part of the world will drop off, declare themselves independent, or

fall into the hands of other powers. If Portsmouth and Plymouth are blockaded-if an enemy's fleet lies at the Nore, and foreign flags wave triumphant in the Channel, how long will Ĉanada, the East or West Indies, maintain their allegiance? How soon will the splendid, but half ruined colonies in the Gulf of Mexico, shake off chains from which they have so long received nothing but injury-how rapidly will Canada rival the independence of the United States, and lay the foundations of a powerful state on the shores of the St Lawrence-how quickly will the magnificent empire of the East dissolve into air! Let us not deceive ourselves, tranquil and imposing as our colonial empire at present is;willingly as all the quarters of the globe now receive the law from the Chapel of St Stephens ;-peaceably as our fleets pass from hemisphere to hemisphere, without leaving the British dominions; a single rude shock would unloose the girdle which surrounds the globe, and the parent state in the Atlantic would be left in melancholy loneliness to contemplate the empires which have risen from its ruined dominions.

And let our manufacturers consider the prospects which await them, if by such an event the sceptre of the ocean is wrested from Britain. Are they aware of the deep, the unextinguishable jealousy of English industry and opulence which pervades their rivals, both in Europe and America? If disaster attends our fleets, how rapidly will this feeling burst forth in every part of the world! With what alacrity would the combined fleets of Europe and America carry the torch into the arsenals of Plymouth and Portsmouth, and avenge, in the glorious pile, the - bombardment of Copenhagen, and conflagration of Toulon! How gladly would they cast anchor at the mouth of the Thames, the Mersey, and the Clyde, and seize, with piratical avidity, the fleets which have so long wafted to the British shores the riches of the East and the West! And, if once these great arteries of the empire are closed, where will be our boasted export of manufactures? Will our democratic operatives, with their fervour, their self-sufficiency, their Trades' Unions, be able to man the remnant of our fleets, and con

tend for the empire of the ocean with the navies which have beat down the flag of Trafalgar? How will they get their goods sold in such circumstances? Reduced to the home-market for consumption, how will the clamorous millions whom the town-directed policy of the last twenty years has called into existence, find bread? Where will be the sixty millions worth of manufactured goods which are now exported? Where the hundreds of thousands who now depend on their sale for their existence? Do the manufacturers suppose that the evil days are never to arise to Britainthat she alone is to be an exception to all earthly things? Do they imagine that the export of sixty millions a-year may be calculated upon as a fixed issue, independent of all political disasters, like the discharge of the waters of the Thames into the ocean? Have they ever considered how they would earn their subsistence, if, with our maritime superiority, our means of exporting any thing whatever, come to an end? And how short-sighted, therefore, are all those measures which, with a view to give an additional and unnatural impulse to the sale of our manufactures in foreign states, lay the axe to the root of that very naval power by which, and which alone, any part of that foreign sale can be permanently secured!

Vainest of all is the hope, that by revolutionizing the adjoining states, and encircling ourselves like France with a zone of affiliated republics, we can obtain a permanent shield, independent of our maritime superiority. Do our deluded Movement men really suppose that France and Belgium, under either Doctrinaire or Republican sway, under Marshal Soult or the Citizen King, will take up arms to maintain the maritime superiority of Great Britain, or enable our manufacturers to deluge them and other nations with their goods? We can tell them they never were more miserably mistaken. What have we got, either from France or Belgium, in return for our reciprocity concessions? Have they lowered the duties on iron or cotton goods? What did America do in furtherance of the spirit of conciliation between free states? Lay on the tariff, which was modified only by the

threat of civil war from the Southern States. The more republican nations become, it may be relied on they will become the more jealous of each other's mercantile or manufacturing industry; for this plain reason, that the classes who are personally interested in such employments obtain then the direction of public affairs. Who passed the Navigation Act? The Long Parliament and Cromwell. Who forced the exclusive tariff upon the Southern States of America? The manufacturing interests of the northern parts of the Union. Why is it that France is so resolutely fixed in resisting any relaxation of her rigid and exclusive mercantile system? Because the manufacturing interests in her great towns have acquired a predominance in the Chamber of Deputies. Nothing is more certain, therefore, than that the more democratic the European states be come, the more will they be devoured with jealousy of our manufacturing and maritime greatness; and to hope for support from them, when their governments are directed by such interests, is to fall into a delusion of all others the most deplorable.

The circumstances of the world are such as to excite the most serious alarms for the durability of our maritime superiority, independent altogether of the disastrous effects of the reciprocity system, in which we have so blindly and obstinately persisted. It is in vain to conceal that the maritime resources of Russia are not only already very considerable, but extending with a rapidity in the highest degree_alarming. The whole fleets of the Baltic, the navies of Sweden, Denmark, and Prussia, are at her command, and are ready to start, at a moment's warning, to revenge the disasters of Copenhagen, and assert the principles of the armed neutrality. She has twenty-two sail of the line in the Black Sea; the remnant which the flames of Navarino have left of the Turkish fleet is at her disposal; the Dardanelles, under the auspices of a liberal Whig administration, have become a Russian strait, and the Euxine an impregnable, inaccessible Russian harbour. We ourselves counselled the Sultan, when he turned to us for aid in his extremity, to apply to Russia, because our fleets were employed in blocka

ding the Scheldt and watching Lisbon. He did so; and the treaty of Constantinople, which gave the Russians the command of the whole naval resources of the Turkish empire, and ultimately of the whole sailors of Greece, was the consequence. Russia could at this moment fit out, between herself and her allies, eighty ships of the line, to join in the naval crusade against England; and of the quality of the seamen on board her fleets, we have not only had proof in the fight of Navarino, but we have the best evidence in the authority of Nelson, who counselled all his officers to "lay their vessels alongside a Frenchman, but strive to out-manœuvre a Russian." The stubborn valour of the North will in the end be as formidable by sea as by land; the sea-kings who so often desolated the British shores, issued from the shores of the Baltic; possibly a naval Leipsic yet awaits the maritime forces of England.

If such is the enemy arising on our own element against us on one side, what shall we say to the foe which is appearing on the other? The Americans have long been, next to ourselves, the greatest carrying nation in the world; and for the last fourteen years, under the influence of the reciprocity system, they have never engrossed less than twothirds, sometimes as much as fivesixths, of the direct trade with Great Britain. What their naval prowess is, we know by dear-bought experience in the last war; and if historic candour cannot award to the captors of the Guerrier, the Java, and the Macedonia, the highest naval honours, it cannot refuse them the second. This rapid growth of the American, like the Russian marine, under the influence of a population which in those youthful states doubles once in thirty or forty years, render these two Powers in the highest degree formidable to the British navy; and it is at the very time that they are making unexampled strides on our own element, that we have chosen to transfer to them, by the reciprocity system, the sinews of our maritime power.

Are then the prospects of England irretrievably gloomy: is the sun of our naval superiority for ever set: and is the present generation destined to witness the extinction of the

greatest Colonial empire that ever existed? No! the means of salvation are yet in our power; our maritime superiority may yet be maintained; our girdle of colonies may yet encircle the earth. It is in the extent and rapid growth of our own COLONIES that the counterpoise is to be found to all the ambition of Russia, and all the jealousy of America. The difference between colonial trade, and trade with foreign nations, as it affects maritime power, is incalculable; and for this plain reason, that colonial trade, like the home trade, is all carried on in your own bottoms; whereas, more than a half of every foreign trade is engrossed by the foreign nation. From the curious and highly valuable table below, it appears that while our exports to America are immense, amounting to twelve millions' worth of British manufacture, the tonnage of our shipping, which that trade employs, is little more than a sixth of that employed in the trade to Canada, which only takes off a fourth part of the quantity of manufactures absorbed by the United States. In other words, the employment given to British shipping in the trade to our own colonies in North America is TWENTYFOUR greater, on the same amount of exports and imports, than to the independent state in the same portion of the globe; while our trade with Germany, which takes off nine millions worth a-year of exports, only gives employment to a half the shipping employed in the export of goods to the West Indies, whose consumption of our goods is hardly half as great. In other words, on the same amount of exports and imports, the encouragement to our shipping is only a FOURTH in the German of what it is in the West India trade. After so signal a proof of the difference between foreign and colonial trade, farther argument or illustration would be superfluous.

When we reflect on the extraordinary growth of our colonial shipping during the last twelve years, amidst the stagnation and decay of that employed in European commerce; when we recollect, that during that time the tonnage employed in the trade to New Holland has increased tenfold, and that in the commerce with our North American colonies risen from 350,000 to 500,000 tons, we cannot entertain a doubt that the means of preserving for a very long period, and establishing on a securer basis than ever, our maritime superiority, yet exists. Great Britain is an old state, teeming with wealth, inhabitants, and energy; her colonial dependencies boundless in extent, inexhaustible in fertility, incalculable in importance. To unite the heart with the extremities of such an empire; to convey to the colonies, famishing for men, and money, and manufactures, the overflowings of the parent state, redundant with them all, the British navy, public and private, exists; an inexhaustible and unconquerable arm, if not paralyzed by the insanity of its own government. It is in our own progeny, in our own descendants in every part of the globe, that we must look for our only effectual stay; it is in a sedulous and unceasing regard to their interests, that we must seek for the means of stanching the all but mortal wounds which the reciprocity system has inflicted on our maritime power. But let us not deceive ourselves; this last stay can be preserved only by constant regard to colonial interests. If the Whig system of colonial oppression, exemplified in the projected equalization of the timber-duties, and accomplished ruin of the West India islands, is persisted in, the finishing stroke to our national independence is given; and, with the loss of our colonies, our liberty, our glory, and our existence, is at an end.

WE have all our lives envied Adam. Yet, would you believe it, not for his abode in Paradise. The soul cannot now conceive a perfect ly sinless and perfectly happy state of being; and a mere name, and no more, to our ear is the garden of Eden-ere was plucked

"That forbidden fruit, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe."

Our first parents are not felt to be our first parents till they have fallen;

then it is that we indeed love them; our filial affection is made tender by pity and awful by fear-and we weep to think of them, as they, "Hand in hand, and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way."

It was original sin that made this earth so beautiful-that gave it a beauty dashed and broken with tears. Look long at a rose bush covered with lapsing dewdrops, and you grow sorrowful-full of sorrow. If there were not the consciousness of some great loss, and the presage of some great restoration, a sight so simple in its purity could not so profoundly move the spirit, as that its confession should be a prayer. Not surely in form and colour alone lies the beauty of the rainbow.

We envy Adam because he was driven from Paradise. For a while the earth for him and poor Eve brought forth but thorns-so is it writ. But as the wind blew from Paradise, it brought seeds that sowed themselves in the desert-till erelong the desert blossomed like the rose. Assisted by younger hands, Adam could afford to steal an hour or two as the sun was westering, from the toil of field tillage, and through the twilight, and sometimes well on into the night, would he and Eve, not unregarded by the stars, work by their two selves, shaping bowers, and arbours, and glades, so as to form, by a model imperishable in their memories, another small new garden of Edennot, indeed, so delightful-but dearer, far dearer to their souls, because every leaf was tinted by grief. Melancholy names did they give, then, to the thoughtless plants

and flowers, and they loved them the better that thenceforth they reminded them always-but not painfully-of their transgressionnow suffering a punishment so softened, that it sometimes was felt to be a chastened peace. Their hillside garden sloped to a stream, that, no doubt, was a branch of the holy river, of which the blind seer sings, "southward through Eden went a river large." We see the vision now-but her mortal prime; and as for Adam, we fear to paint it. Eve is still in not Seth's self is comparable to his sire-though his parents were wont to say, that their Seth had a face and a form that reminded them of one of the angels-that to be indeed an angel, he wanted but those wings that winnowed fragrance through the air as they descended on Paradise.

And thus it is that to us all gardens are beautiful-and all gardeners Adam's favourite sons. An Orchard! Families of fruit trees "nigh planted by a river," and that river the Clyde. Till we gazed on you we knew not how dazzling may be the delicate spring, even more than the gorgeous autumn with all her purple and gold. No frost can wither, no blast can scatter, such a power of blossoming as there brightens the day with promise that the gladdened heart may not for a moment doubt will be fulfilled!-And now we walk arm in arm with a venerable lady along a terrace hung high above a river-but between us and the brink of the precipice a leafless lawn-not of grass, but of moss, whereon centuries seem softly embedded-and lo! we are looking-to the right down down the glen, and to the left up up the glen-though to the left it takes a majestic bend, so that yonder castle, seemingly almost in front of us, stands on one of its cliffs -now we are looking over the top of holly hedges twenty feet high, and over the stately yew-pawns and peacocks-but hark! the fleshand-blood peacock shrieking from the pine! An old English gardensuch as Bacon, or Evelyn, or Cowley would have loved-felicitously