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number of these officers should be reduced, and brought as low as consists with the performance of the services which it is the business of Government to render.

The misery and distress of the country, are denied, it seems, only by Lord Castlereagh and Geo. Chalmers. Therefore, we consider it as a fact fully established. We have shewn, we think undeniably, unless, perhaps, to such persons as Lord Castlereagh, George Chalmers, and Mr. Western, that the reduction in the price of corn is not the cause of the nation's calamities. We shall therefore assume this point also as proved. Hence, two questions now remain, and they are these:

First, What is the cause of such calamities?

And next, What is the remedy for them?

About the cause, it does appear wonderful that there should be any difference of opinion. Let us ask, What has happened? To which of all the sources of calamity incident to a nation, have we been exposed? There is the Scriptural enumeration-Famine, Pestilence, and the Sword. Assuredly, it is to none of these; for instead of famine, it is repletion of which some of us complain; and instead of feeling the sword of others, it is our sword which has been at work upon them.

What every body But of the producdiscover any other

How can

What then is or what can be, the cause? complains of, is poverty. This is the evil. tion of this evil we defy the sons of Adam to cause than the following: namely, the destruction of the national property by the Government, and in some, though a far inferior, degree, the derangements of business by the war. it be imagined that the enormous, the unheard of, the incredible expenditure to which this nation has been subjected by the operations of Government, should not have produced the effects which we behold, which we lament, and under which the nation languishes and mourns? The wonder is, not that it has produced such effects, but that it has not produced them in still greater measure, and at a much earlier period. The miracle is, that the productive powers of the country have been so long able to keep pace with the destructive powers of Government; have been so long able to save the nation from feeling the stings of increasing poverty, notwithstanding the immense and increasing mass of property which the Government annually consumed! During a period of scarcely twenty-five years, the Government has actually expended more than one thousand nine hundred millions sterling! Only think of one thousand nine hundred millions abstracted from the property of this people, in the course of twentyfive years; and wonder at their poverty if you can! Only think of the virtue and industry of this people having created, in the course of twenty-five years, one thousand nine hundred millions of property, to be taken from them! to be consumed by others,

and not by themselves! a property for which they laboured, but with which they were allowed neither to increase their riches, nor add to their enjoyments! excepting as far as the pleasures and profits of war extended. These are the compensation! These, we hope, the nation will duly appreciate! In these we are to look for our return! Our people suffer; the means of employment are diminished; that is, part of our capital is lost; we are tortured by all the miseries of a people dropping into want. But, on the other hand, we have to look at the pleasures and benefits of the war; of a twenty-five years' war. Let them not be forgotten. Let the due value of them, never, never be overlooked. May the Great Director of minds guide this people to a true estimate of their gains by the recent war! From what endless miseries in future might our country then be redeemed!

Having pointed out a cause surely adequate to the lamented effect, having pointed out the only cause which can with a sha-. dow of reason be assigned, we leave it to the reflections of our readers, (it surely deserves the serious reflections of us all,) and pass to the next inquiry, on which also we have little power to enlarge; namely, what is the remedy most applicable to the alarming disease?

We might, with firm confidence, in the first place, declare a number of things which are not the remedy. A standing army of one hundred and fifty thousand men in time of peace, or of one half of that number, is no remedy for a nation diseased by exhaustion. An expense, exclusive of army, navy, and ordnance, of little less than four millions per annum by Government at home, is not a cure for the diseases of a nation reduced to wretchedness by taxation and loans.

The remedy must be found in the very opposite of all this. If a man is brought to the point of death by excessive bleeding, cease the destructive operation, and if the constitution is not too much impaired, it will recover itself. If the nation is reduced to poverty and distress, by the excessive expenditure of Government, put an end to that ruinous procedure, and the nation is not yet so impaired as not soon to re-attain its prosperity and happiness. Nor is it enough, that this little item, and that little item, should be retrenched, while the great body of the thing remains entire. The great body of the expense should fix the attention of the nation. It is the size of the mass that proves the nature of the power by which it is aggregated, and the effects which it cannot fail to produce. It is the body of the thing, the mass, in its totality, that must be taken in hand, and dealt with neither faintly nor treacherously. Government ought to be no longer a source of impoverishment to the nation; a great instrument to destroy property, as fast as it is created; and however the nation may toil and produce, keep it always needy, always

in pain. The services which it is the business of Governments to render, the services in the rendering of which their whole utility consists, require but a trifling expenditure; and strictly to that measure ought the expenses of Government to be confined. The expences of government are only a means to these services as an end. The end and the means ought to be proportioned to one another. If the useless expenses of Government, if the money which it consumes beyond what the services of Government require, were made out of nothing, if it were rained from heaven, like manna upon the camp of the Hebrews, we might be content to see it expend as much as it pleased, unless we saw its expenditure directed to the ruin of our liberties; (a direction, by the by, which the excessive expenditure of Government can hardly fail to take ;) but unhappily every thing which Government spends, belongs to somebody else, and cannot be given to Government without being taken from the owners. Now this is horrid, that one set of men, under the denomination of Government, should be allowed to take from other men what belongs to them, only that they may spend it for no good; for nothing for which the other men are the better. This is the interior, essential description of pure injustice. This is the genuine sacrifice of one man to another; and if allowed to be practised by other men among themselves as it is by Governments towards all, would be the destruction of human society, and of the human race.

Our case is far from being mysterious. There is a great inass of suffering; and this, with the exception of those who live upon the taxes, is universal. The nation has suffered some great calamity. The land mourns. When we ask for the source of the evil, we easily discover one; and our utmost search can discover no more. But that one, it is plainly seen, is fully suficient to account for all the melancholy effects. We have been rushing on for a space of nearly five and twenty years, consuming anually at the hands of the Government, such a portion of property created by the people, as the world never saw consumed by any Government before. It ought to have been foreseen, that the moment the pace of consumption at the hands of Government outran the pace of reproduction at the hands of the people, misery, intense misery, would ensue.

Had the pace of destruction at the hands of Government not outrun the pace of production by the hands of the people, would no evil have been done?—Yes! abundance of evil would have been done; but it would not have existed in quite so visible a form. No feature of wretchedness, entirely new, would have arisen. The pain would have been of an old, habitual kind; and the people would, therefore, have been much less roused by it; would have been much more disposed to bear it without murmuring. There would have been less impatience, less noise, less

complaint. Ministers would have been much less annoyed, and might have gone on the usual career of expense with more ease and safety. Would this have been an advantage? In our opinion, the very reverse! For when a great disease exists in the constitution, it becomes the more dangerous the longer it lurks in the frame without being known, without exciting all the attention of the patient, and rousing him at the earliest possible moment, to the application of the specific remedy. If the people suffer no harm by the unnecessary destruction of their property at the hands of Government, though they are able every year to create as much new property as the Government destroys; then, no landlord is injured when his rents are rising, though he is every year robbed by his steward, to the full amount of this increase: no merchant or manufacturer is injured, while succeeding by excessive labour to make his capital every year more and more productive, though he is each year robbed by his clerks and servants to the full amount of the addition he has made: no man who labours for his bread, and by excess of industry and frugality has got a little surplus at the end of the year, suffers any injury, if this little surplus is annually snatched away from him by a thief!

Such the

Such is the reasoning upon which the excessive and unnecessary expenditure of Government must be defended! reasoning, whatever be the external shape, more hidden or more visible, which circumstances may allow the evit to assume! No reasoning will suffice, but that which subverts all the foundations of justice and morality; and establishes the will, that is, the interest, of the strongest, as the only principle of right and wrong. We challenge, upon this point, all the advocates of misgovernment upon the face of the earth. Let Government spend so much as one shilling, without which the services due from Government might have been rendered as well, and we defy human ingenuity to produce an argument in favour of it, which will not involve a defence of every species of crime. Let the wise who are in the nation ponder upon this. Let them think of the school of morality which is set up by the numerous preachers, both in Parliament and out of it, whose favourite, or at any rate constant employment, is the vindication of expense. Is it any wonder, when a doctrine which involves the defence of every breach of morality, is so diligently propagated, and so highly countenanced, that morality in this nation should be in a lamentable state that it should continue far below the state of civilization to which we have otherwise attained; and spread thick disgrace upon our Legislature?

Art. II. 1. Two Tracts intended to convey correct Notions of Regene ration and Conversion according to the Sense of Holy Scripture, and of the Church of England. Extracted from the Bampton Lecture of 1812, and published in a Form adapted for Circulation among the Community at large, at the Request of the Salop District Committee of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, by Richard Mant, M A. Chaplain to His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Rector of St. Botolph's, Bishopgate, &c. A new Edition, 12mo. pp. 96. Rivington. 1815.

2. Baptism a Seal of the Christian Covenant: or Remarks on the Former of two Tracts intended to convey correct Notions of Regeneration, &c, by Thomas Biddulph, A. M. Minister of St. James's Bristol, and of Durston, Somersetshire, &c. 8vo. pp. viii. 256. Price 5s. Hatchard. 1816.

3. An Enquiry into the Effect of Baptism, according to the Sense of the Holy Scripture and of the Church of England: In Answer to the Rev. Dr. Mant's Two Tracts, by the Rev. John Scott, M. A. Vicar of North Ferriby, &c. 8vo. pp. 270. Seeley. 1815. 4. Spiritual Regeneration not necessarily connected with Baptism, in Answer to a Tract upon Regeneration, published by Dr. Mant. In which is examined the Doctrine of the Church of England upon the above subject; and the Clergy of the Established Church justified in preaching the Doctrine of Regeneration to Persons who have been baptized. By George Bugg, A. B. 12mo. pp. 172. Price 3s. Kettering, Printed. Seeley. London. 1816.

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T is now one hundred and fifty years since two thousand pious and many of them learned clergymen of the Church of England, were compelled by the Act of Uniformity, to resign their stations in the Establishment, and in many instances relinquishing their only means of subsistence, to embrace the alternative of contumely, poverty, and suffering, rather than bow their consciences to the usurped authority of an impious faction. These conscientions recusants became nonconformists, not on the ground of any abstract principles respecting the lawfulness or the expediency of ecclesiastical establishments, but because the conditions, on which alone they could have retained their connexion with the National Church, were such as it was well known they would not, because conscientiously they could not, comply with. The Act of Uniformity was framed deliberately and expressly with a view to exclude them from the Church. It required them to declare their unfeigned assent and con'sent to all and every thing contained and prescribed in and by the book entitled, The Book of Common Prayer and Ad'ministration of the Sacraments:' and to subscribe ex animo to the declaration that the book of Common Prayer and of ordaining bishops, priests, and deacons, containeth nothing in it which is contrary to the word of God, and that it may be

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