many years back has not annually imported more than eleven days' consumption, and certainly not more than the consumption of a fortnight. In other words, Britain is raising as much corn as serves for fifty weeks' consumption in the year of all her population, and which by a thousand shifts and expedients could be easily made to serve for two weeks longer. But besides, the change, come when it may, will in all likelihood come gradually, and be amply met by the still more rapid increase of our own agriculture, which has more than doubled its produce during the last forty years. In short, Britain is wholly beyond the reach of those analogies which are now being conjured up to frighten our isle from its propriety; and unlike either to Carthage or to Italy in any former stages of its history, she may share in their fate from some other cause, but not certainly from the cause under which the once powerful states of Venice and Genoa have withered into extinction-even that when abandoned by their commerce, they had no sufficient agricultural basis to fall back upon.

But there is still another ground for dismay, and more reasonble than the one that we have just disposed of. We have spoken of another cause for a reduction in the money price of grain, distinct from the abolition of Corn Laws-even such a decay of our underselling power, and so such a diminution of exports, that we may at length cease to be a grain-importing country, when common agricultural prices will fall towards a level with those on the Continent. Would not such a result, it may well be asked, entail ruin on our landlords, and derange or overturn all the existing relations of society? It would not if ours was a wholly unindebted country for with the fall in the price of first necessaries, there would be a proportional fall in the price of every thing else, and so the same command as before even with the smaller moneyrents, of all those articles which make up the style and comfort of families. But ours is a heavily indebted country, and it is the great national, along with the private mortgages, which give to our landlords not a nominal only, but a real and substantial interest in high money prices. But neither is this beyond the reach of adjustment and all the more practicable, the more that our public revenue were drawn from taxes on income and property, and less from taxes on commodities than heretofore. Under such a system of finance, it were possible so to share the Income tax between landholders on the one hand, and fundholders or private creditors on the other, as that, by a regulated scale of centages, varying with and dependent on the average yearly price of corn, each of these classes might retain the same proportional wealth, and be upheld in the same relative station to each other as before. We can proceed no farther at present with this explanation; but shall only say, that on the adoption of such

a system, the apprehension lest a lower money price should throw the poorer soils out of cultivation, would become a downright chimera.* In every country where justice and protection are strong enough to secure for every man the fruits of his own industry, land will never cease to be cultivated-save from choice, but never from necessity-so long as it gives back, in return for the labour bestowed on it, enough of produce to maintain the labourers, along with a sufficient surplus to defray all the expenses of its management, and yield a remunerating profit to the farmer. But, in proportion as taxes are taken off from commodities, and laid on the net-income of landholders and mortgagees, including, of course, fundholders, the joint proprietors of far the heaviest of all our mortgages-in that proportion will the expenses of farm-management be diminished, and husbandmen be enabled to enter on the culture of still poorer soils than before. It is thus, that so far from a narrower, we might have both a more thorough and a more extended agriculture than before; and not only would landowners receive an equivalent for their lower money rents, in the general and proportional cheapness of all that now enters into their personal and family expenditure; but in the now larger difference of rent between that of the superior soils and that of the land last entered on, would they receive an overpassing compensation. Truly, they have nothing to fear but from their own obstinacy and their own blindness-when standing in conjunct array, at one time against the rights of perty, and at another against the rights of conscience, they call forth the re-action of every generous and indignant feeling in society on behalf of the natural liberties of men.

pro

But there is a far higher interest than any that we have yet spoken of immensely higher than either the revenue of landlords, or the accumulating wealth of capitalists-we mean, the cheering spectacle of prosperous and well-paid industry throughout the great bulk and body of our common people. What we most aspire after is the greatest happiness of the greatest number. All the gaudy efflorescence of an affluent and high aristocracy is but tinsel and vanity, when compared, in respect of importance, with the substantial well-being of those thousands and

If we may judge, indeed, from the experience of the past, there is much of the chimerical in this apprehension, even under the existing economy of things. Mr. M'Culloch tells us in his tract, that "the price of wheat in England, at an average of the ten years, ending with 1820, was no less than 86s. 3d. a-quarter. Its average price has since, as we have just seen, been reduced to 56s. 114d. a-quarter; and yet, notwithstanding this tremendous fall, a most extraordinary improvement has taken place in agriculture since 1820; so much so, that we now provide for an additional population of, at least, SEVEN MILLIONS, not only without any increase, but with a very considerable diminution, of importation."

VOL. I. NO. I.

G

millions who overspread the ground-floor of our social and political edifice. To elevate this lowest platform of humanity-the platform of humble life-is the best object, on this side of death, to which either patriot or philanthropist can consecrate their labours. We have said, that should any brief or temporary enlargement ensue on the abolition of the Corn Laws, some advantage might possibly be taken of it for the permanent amelioration of the working classes. But this subject is far too unwieldy for being entered on now. It is the theme, however, which, of all others, most occupies and engages the public attention, and on which the press is even now teeming with authorship. We therefore trust, that, in the exercise of our vocation, we shall meet with a still fitter opportunity than is afforded by our present argument for entertaining this momentous question—a question which, in the magnitude both of its character and its results, might well cast into the shade all the commonplace topics of our present popular and political agitation.

We shall offer a summary of our present article in three sen

tences.

The abolition of the Corn Laws will not inflict on the upper classes the evils they are afraid of.

The abolition of the Corn Laws will not confer on the lower classes the good which they expect from it.

The continuance of the Corn Laws, from the very aspect which they hold forth, nay, from the very purpose for which they were framed, of enriching one order of the community at the expense of another, will never cease to awaken fierce and hostile passions in the bosom of society; and, therefore, they ought to be dealt with as a moral nuisance that is, utterly and conclusively swept

away.

ART. IV. - Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs. Grant of Laggan, Author of "Letters from the Mountains," "Memoirs of an American Lady," &c. Edited by her Son, J. P. GRANT, Esq. 3 vols. London, 1844.

SOME people burn all the letters they receive, and keep no copies of those they write. Others dip their whole epistolary treasures into an anti-dry-rot-solution-embalm every scrap to or from friend and foe-and, with wonderful method of label and docquet, exhibit to gossiping contemporaries and gaping posterity a collection which entomologists may envy, while they imitate it. Heavy charges, and a good deal of practical benevolence, may be said to lie at the doors alike of the Destructives and the Conservatives. Both are wantonly indiscriminate for good and evil. The trash from which we have been saved by wholesale and promiscuous conflagration can only be estimated, with a pleasant shudder, by looking at what has been imposed on us from an over-sensitive dislike to a single act of incendiarism. Spontaneous combustion, we fear, is too lofty a sacrifice to expect from foolscap or double-wove. But, at the same time, what we possess of course we mean the really valuable part of our acquisition-leads us undoubtedly to believe that much has irrecoverably perished, which the judicious world, had its voice been heard, would not willingly have suffered to die. And, on the whole, the legacies left to us, during cycles of centuries, in the letters and correspondence of all sorts of men and women-the virtuous and wicked, the wise and silly, the illustrious and insignificant-have afforded so much pleasure and instruction, that we ought not perhaps to complain too loudly, though the grain of Pactolian gold must often be wearisomely culled out of a bucket of sand.

We feel especially that familiar letters-" Epistolæ ad Quintum fratrem," "Epistolæ ad Atticum,"-the very effusions most likely to escape us, are precisely what we chiefly long to seize and to perpetuate. They are, indeed, windows through which we look far into the heart-valves, at which we observe the wayward ebullitions of temper escaping-meters, by which we calculate the mind's elasticity, the intensity of passions, the oscillations of the will. The easy private letters of an individual bear some analogy to the ballads of a nation. They embody and carry off, as the mood may be, softly or nervously, jocularly or sadly, coarsely or elegantly, and, nine times out of ten, we believe, honestly, the whim or resolve, enjoyment or anguish, rankling or effervescence of the spirit, at the moment of their composition. The pen becomes Ithuriel's spear to the writer; and, now and

then, the paper acts like Medusa's head upon the reader. What a flood of light has not the twinkling star-ray of one letter poured over the previous gloom of a nation's annals! With what a cloud has not another obscured a hitherto sunny renown! And how much reality-fresh living truth, in feature, costume, deportment, habits-is imparted by these illustrative portraits, as we may call them, to the vague delineations of history, of which the high and wide purpose seems to be fulfilled in presenting to us the substance of the action, and only the shadow of the actor. Had the Orations alone emerged above the inundation of ages and barbarous neglect, could we have ventured to dream that the prosecutor of Verres, the denouncer of Antony, the destroyer of Catiline, was a flexible politician, a pusillanimous patriot, an irresolute Roman? The loss of the letters of the younger Pliny had been the loss a heavy one-not merely of an intimate friend and delightful companion, but of our present familiarity with the tastes, accomplishments, pursuits, and temper of his order, his country, and his times. We never read these graceful and fascinating lucubrations of the Roman, without mentally determining to abstain in future from all censure of any collection whatever of familiar letters, and maintain our resolution, until-much too frequently now-a-days--an unfortunate publication compels us to be forsworn.

It is obvious that, in many instances, the sort of household censorship which settles the propriety of putting forth into the world the letters or correspondence of a deceased friend must be gentle and partial. The hand of love unconsciously inclines the balance, and the want of real weight will be more than compensated by the tremulous bias of natural affection. From this very cause, almost commendable in itself, there is occasionally displayed so prodigiously blind a vanity in appreciating what disclosures are fit for the general eye, that it is impossible, in the most indulgent mood, to palliate the folly which has robbed oblivion of its lawful prey. Our present duty, luckily, does not oblige us to deal with any offence of this kind. But it does repeatedly happen, that much is ushered into the garish light of day, which meaning and doing no harm, not meriting or provoking any actual blame, is entitled to little more than this negative commendation. A certain celebrity during life, it would appear, easily induces surviving friends to imagine that they cannot too lavishly distribute what they find in their hands as executors, and rashly to expect a price for their gift which could be allowed, if at all, but in virtue of associations with which the living generation, or the busy marts of men generally, can be in nowise familiar, and only dimly cognizant. This error, it is true, may spring from a not unamiable infatuation, when, with our whole heart