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fallen into the clutches of the Castlereaghs and the Jenkinsons." No,” said I, we cannot go to supper yet. We must first pay for the pleasure of the play." This we are now doing; and all the weepings and wailings and gnashing of teeth contained in the Book of the Board of Agriculture, will not shorten the period previous to the supper-party.

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That the taxes must be reduced is very certain. Nearly forty millions a year are raised in indirect taxes. These will in a short time reduce themselves. It is impossible that it should be otherwise, for reasons, which I have stated to the public a hundred times over, and which reasons would, I am sure, suggest themselves to you, long before they ever were stated in print. The truth is, that the direct taxes will not be collected to the amount of one-half of the assessment that has been made. It is perfectly useless for the collectors to send round their threatening letters, to tell people, that they are defaulters, and that Exchequer processes will be issued out against them. All this is perfectly useless. It will not put money into the pockets of those who have none. In the way of example, seizure will be of no use, seeing that the nonpayment proceeds wholly from inability. If the taxes be collected by seizure, the Government strikes down to the earth one of the payers of taxes by every such seizure. It acts the part of the boy with his goose. It gets one golden egg, but it puts a stop to the ladder for ever. Yet this part has it been acting all over the country; and this part it must act, in order to obtain anything like the amount of the taxes now due. The threatening letters of the Government agents are now lying before the far greater part of the farmers; no wonder that the newspapers tell us, that these latter have hurried their corn to market in an unripe and damp state." They are endeavouring by these means to avert the danger that threatens them; and thus a premature harvesting and a great destruction of corn has taken place; the corn thus hurried to the market, falls into the hands of monied men, and however high a price it may finally bring, the low price at which the farmer is compelled to sell it will be his ruin. To such a point of distress have the people in the country been brought by this horrid system of taxation, that Truck, or Barter, is beginning to take place, in the lieu of purchase and sale. A man, instead of buying a horse, gives a cow and a calf for a horse; a hog is exchanged against a heifer; a sheep is given in exchange for some other animal; and so on. In one part of Wales, the Book tells us, that the poor-rates are collected in kind; that is to say, that the farmers, having no money to pay, give the overseers wheat, potatoes, or other articles of food, in lieu of money. The Board express their dignified indignation at this; but does not the Government take its taxes in kind too, when it comes and seizes the corn and the cattle of the defaulter? Yes, and in a more cruel manner too, for it lays its hands on what it pleases; and it is not content to take as much as will pay it at the full value of the several articles; but it begins a sale at auction, and it keeps on selling, at any price, till it has got the amount of its demand, adding thereto the enormous expenses of the law.

It is therefore, Sir, utterly impossible, under these circumstances, for taxes to be collected to the amount of sixty millions a year. The papermoney, as I have always said, must be sent forth in quantity sufficient to keep the price of wheat steady at fifteen shillings a bushel or higher, or the interest of the debt cannot be paid, to say nothing about the army or the civil list. Whether the paper-money can be got out again, is a

question about which I have always expressed myself to be in great doubt; but, if this be not done, the interest of the debt must be lowered, or the estates of the landowners must actually be seized upon and transferred to the fundholders. Such is the result of a long and bloody war, which has put off Parliamentary Reform, and which has restored tyranny and persecution in the fairest part of Europe. And, if one could suppose it possible that the Waterloo Column scheme could now be persevered in, this result ought to be inscribed upon every side of that column.

The Board of Agriculture tells us that too much attention cannot be paid to the subject of the poor-rates. There is another subject, however, which merits a greater portion of attention at this time. When during the discussions on the Bullion Report, the time of the House had been occupied for many nights with speeches abounding in all sorts of absurdities; and after the opposition, with Mr. Horner at their head, had been contending that gold and silver ought to be restored to circulation at the end of two years from eighteen hundred and eleven, and the ministry had been contending, that, though the restoration of gold and silver to circulation was extremely desirable, it was not expedient just at that time, to adopt Mr. Horner's proposition: after all this talk on both sides, I remember well (and your words are upon record in the debates) that you told them both, that if gold and silver were restored to circulation, the interest of the debt could never be paid. Gold and silver are not yet restored to circulation; but a mere approach towards it has proved to the nation, that you, who have never been a talker about finance, as the pack of briefless lawyers call it, understood more of the matter than both the factions put together, aided by all their clerks and all their dealers in paper-money, with all their piles of figures and all their rates of exchanges. This is a fact, which is indeed worthy of being borne in mind by the nation. None of these prating and wig-pated men; none of these Horners and Ponsonbys and Percevals and Vansittarts appear to have had any knowledge as to causes and consequences on such subjects, more than so many magpies. Indeed, how should they? The very habits of their life have given them a turn of mind, which absolutely disqualifies them from taking an enlarged view upon any subject of national concern. Be this as it may, however, we have now before us the proof, that you were right, and that both these factions were wrong. It is not, therefore, too much to hope, that some part, at least, of those persons who were so long deceived into the belief, that you had not the good of the country at heart, will now be convinced of the contrary, and that they will also be convinced, that the only way, in which they can rationally assist in the rescuing of their country from its present distressed and degraded state, is to give all the support in their power to those strenuous efforts which all the friends of freedom and of humanity now look for at your hands, and in which expectation I am sure they will not be disappointed.

The second remedy proposed is, what think you? A reduction of rent! What exceeding folly is this! One would wonder how the Board came not to be ashamed of putting such a proposition upon paper as containing a remedy for a national evil. A distressed farmer, indeed, may very well say that this is a remedy for him; but what sort of a remedy is it for his landlord, and for all the dependants upon his landlord? Nor is it any remedy for the poor, seeing that in whatever degree the farmer obtains relief, and is thereby enabled to give employment to the poor, the landlord is depressed and is unable to give employment to the poor. But,

as we shall see, by and by, the far greater part of these remedies are extremely well characterized by the old saying of robbing Peter to pay Paul, as, indeed, every remedy must be, which does not strike at the root of the evil, namely, the taxes imposed by the Government. There is, however, in this project of reducing rents, something of a revolutionary tinge. The proposition, to have any sense in it, must mean, that landlords in general should be compelled to reduce their rents. This would be a neat little touch in the levelling way. But, as I said in my last letter, let these gentlemen go on, and we shall soon see that their wars against revolution will end in a revolution of their own making.

The third remedy is, to commute tithes. If to commute means to abolish, or to diminish, there may be something like sense in the proposition, that is to say, if those who make the proposition are desirous to reduce the power and influence of the clergy. But if to commute means the mere changing of the mode of payment; how can this possibly be a remedy for national distress? If I pay in money the full value of my tithe, what do I gain by putting an end to the collection in kind? Besides, in nine cases out of ten, the tithes are not now collected in kind; so that this proposition must contemplate an abolition or a diminution of tithe. Considering that so many of the clergy have, for the last thirty years, been such fast and efficient allies of the boroughmongers; considering that they have fallen so far from the character of their predecessors in the reign of James the Second, when the Church of England stood foremost in the ranks against despotism; considering this, one might be excused for leaving the clergy to be dealt with as it might seem meet to their associates in hostility against the rights and liberties of the nation; but even then, we who scorn to be the agents of delusion, ought to observe, that the proposed diminution or abolition of the property of the clergy could not possibly operate as a remedy for national distress; seeing that, in whatever degree the means of the landlord or tenant would be augmented in this way, the means of the clergy would be diminished; and in whatever degree the landlords and tenants would be enabled to give more employment than they now give, the clergy would be compelled to give less employment. There would be a little shifting of distress from one part of the community to the other, but the mass of distress would be the same; and in this case, too, the distress would remain pretty equally divided through the several parishes as it now is. A few days ago, in a parish in which I have some concern, there was a proposition on foot for the parish to contract to keep a turnpike-road in repair, in order to get something for the labour of the poor. An obstacle arose as to the legality of such a contract, and the scheme was not adopted. But a much better reason for rejecting the scheme would have been, that, in whatever degree the parish purse would have been relieved in this way, it would have been loaded by the throwing out of work the individuals now employed upon the road. But it is ever thus with men who do not reflect somewhat deeply. They always lay hold of something that floats upon the surface; after a time they perceive their error; another scheme equally superficial is adopted; and thus they go on blundering from scheme to scheme, augmenting rather than diminishing the calamity, which it is their object to put an end to.

The fourth, eighth, tenth, and fourteenth remedies are all of the same tendency. The object of them is to raise the price of corn and other produce of the land by means of prohibition to importation. The con

sequence of every law of this sort, would be to make the price of food, upon an average, somewhat dearer, or higher in price. But what end would this answer? It could only answer the end, in so far as it operated to make every other article dearer. It would, in all probability, diminish greatly the commerce and manufacturing of the country; and it certainly would greatly diminish the navigation of the country. It would take from the cultivators of the land a considerable portion of their customers; and it would send amongst the agricultural labourers rivals from the trading and manufacturing classes. It requires a much sounder head than nature has thought proper to place upon the shoulders of Mr. Western, to trace measures of this sort to their effects. If that gentleman had been capable of taking a clear view of these effects, he never could have proposed a tax upon linseed as a remedy for the distresses of Agriculture. What! are those distresses which so manifestly have arisen from the diminution of the quantity of paper-money, and which diminution has made the farmer give two bushels of wheat to the Government, instead of the one bushel which he gave it before; are distresses, arising from this tremendous cause, which has swept away property as effectually as a West-India hurricane sweeps away the sheds and sugar-canes of the Planters; are distresses like these to be remedied by the non-importation of corn or seeds or wool or any other article of the produce of the land? Far, I am sure, from a mind like yours, is every such puerile idea. If it were not for this overwhelming torrent of taxation, doubled in its force by the sudden blasts of the banking and funding system; were it not for this irresistible and desolating scourge, our ports might be open to all the world; they might be crowded with the ships of all nations, laden with the produce of every soil and climate; and the exchange of commodities of all sorts might be carried on, unencumbered by the vexations of Custom-houses, and uncontaminated by the roguery of tide-waiters, Custom-house officers, and smugglers. But, such men as Mr. Western, when they feel an evil pressing upon a class of the community, to which they happen to belong, think of nothing but shifting it from their own shoulders, without any consideration for the other shoulders on whom it must fall. I am not one of those who look upon commerce and an export of manufactures as necessary either to the happiness or the power of England. Exhibitions of imports and exports have been one grand means of delusion. I am of opinion that England would always be as much the mistress of the ocean without foreign commerce as with foreign commerce. But in considering of remedies for the present distress, we must take the nation as it now stands, and view it as divided into classes deriving their means from trade, commerce, navigation, and manufactures. The well-being of each of these classes contributes towards the well-being of agriculture, and the wellbeing of agriculture towards the well-being of each of those classes. What nonsense is it, then, to talk of giving the "same favour" to agriculture as to manufacture? As if it were a favour to prevent the importation of manufactured snuff, when it is well known, that the importation is prevented only for the purpose of loading the snuff manufacturer with an enormous tax; or rather, for the purpose of loading snuff-takers with that tax. The farmer, I believe, thinks, that he already pays dearly enough for many articles the raw material of which comes from foreign countries, and yet these gentlemen call it a favour to the manufacturer to prevent the importation of goods made out of those raw materials.

These schemers would have a prohibition against the importation of tallow, hides, linseed, &c., and yet, in the very same breath, they complain of the high price of candles and of leather! The fact is, that the high price of these articles proceeds from the heavy tax which the Government lays upon them; but this is what the greater part of these gentlemen always appear to wish to keep out of sight. If tallow and hides were forbidden to be imported at all, and the tax on the homeraised tallow, or candles, and on the home-raised hides, were the same that it is now, candles and leather would be still dearer than they are now, and therefore, the evil would increase on the one side as much as it would be diminished on the other. It is here as everywhere else, that a diminution of taxes is what is wanted; but here these agricultural people are blindly seeking to obtain price by prohibition of importation, which would only augment their expenses in part, while they ought to be seeking to bring down taxes to a level with their means of paying them. Many of these correspondents are fundholders, or they are closely connected with persons who are fundholders; and therefore, they are straining every nerve to get at some means to obtain money to keep up their payment of taxes, because, unless they can do that, they plainly see that the fundholders cannot be paid. Hence all these schemes for raising the price of corn, of which schemes we are now going to see another!

The fifth, the eleventh, the sixteenth, the seventeenth, the twentysecond, are all of one and the same character. The fifth proposes a bounty on the exportation of corn; the eleventh proposes to lend Exchequer Bills to the farmers; the sixteenth proposes to establish public granaries, and for the Government to purchase corn to put into them; the seventeenth proposes to encourage distilleries; the twenty-second proposes to give a bounty on the cultivation of hemp! What POPE said of the poettasters, who pestered him in his cottage at Twickenham, the public may say of these agricultural schemes. What sort of look these latter may have I do not know, but if the offspring of the brains of Pore's gentry exceeded in wildness what we have here before us, well might he doom them to Bedlam. To make it rational to propose to give the farmers relief by means of a bounty on the export of corn or on the cultivation of hemp, the proposition ought to have two adjuncts, to wit, first, that the farmer should pay no part of the tax out of which the bounty was to come; and, second, that the rest of the community, who would then pay the bounty, should have (from God knows what source) just as much money left to expend upon farm produce as they had before they paid this tax! What insufferable follies; what solemn buffooneries, has not this agricultural distress brought forth to the world! And, as to the loan of Exchequer Bills to the farmers, who is to pay the interest of these Exchequer Bills? Who is to pay off the principal of the Exchequer Bills? And what is this after all, but a loan from the fundholders to the landholders, which must be finally paid, if paid at all, by the transfer of the property of the latter from their own hands into the hands of the former? Public granaries! And whence is to come the money, wherewith to purchase the corn to put in the public granaries? O!" from the Government," to be sure. "The corn to be purchased by Government," thus say these agricultural gentlemen; and exactly in this sort of phrase talk the sharpers and thieves and plunderers about Dock-yards and Barracks and Arsenals and Custom-houses and Excise