CINNAMON AND PEARLS.

WHAT a succession of human crime and human suffering would a HISTORY OF MONOPOLY contain! The general annals of nations, though dark enough upon the whole, are still occasionally relieved by some brighter passages ; but an account of the "Protective System," from the time of Carthage downwards, would present few other alternations than from craft to violence and from vio- lence to craft. We should see the monopoly, acquired by fraud, or force, or both, retained by open tyranny, or by the more insi- dious operation of commercial laws and protective duties; trans- ferred by trading wars • evaded by systematic lawlessness; and broken through by " daring adventure "—to speak of buccaneer- ing in the language of buccaneers. " Plague, pestilence, and famine," would occasionally vary the piece, with death, sometimes sudden enough, but more frequently lingering, and heralded by excessive and ill-requited toil, and all the other concomitants of hopeless poverty.

In Miss MARTINEAU'S new tale, as in some of her former Illus- trations, the science is subordinate to the story. Cinnamon and Pearls is intended to exhibit the Colonial principles of political economy. It is, however, merely a leaf from the Annals of Mono- poly—the instance of a case which, mutatis mutandis, may be parelleled by millions, not only in colonies, but in mother countries. The place Miss MARTINEAU has chosen for her tale is Ceylon; the subjects she has selected for illustration are the Pearl-fishery and Cinnamon-peeling. The hero of the piece is Rayo, a pearl- fisher at the opening of the drama, and subsequently an outcast in the jungle; the heroine is his wife Marana; and the business and disquisitions of the nouvelette are carried on-by a Missionary and his helpmate, by the family of an agent of the " Honourable Company," and by a few subordinate characters. To quote from a well-constructed tale, is, generally, like offering a brick as a specimen of the house. We must, however, try to find some passages from a work where the story, interesting though it be, is secondary in importance to the practical truths of which it is the vehicle. We have, first, A VIEW ON THE COAST OF CEYLON DURING THE PEARL-FISHERY; WITH FIGURES.

All were confident; and the crowds on the beach looked as joyous for the night as if the work was going on for their sakes. A city of bowers seemed to have sprung tip like Jonah's gourd, or like the tabernacles which, in old times of Jewish festivals, made Jerusalem a leafy paradise for a short season of every year. Talipot tents and bamboo huts dressed with greens and flowers were clustered around the sordid dwellings on the sands. Throngs of merchants and craftsmen, black, tawny, and white, with their variety of costumes, mingled in this great fair. The polisher of jewels was there with his glittering treasure. The pearl-driller looked to his needles and pearl-dust, while awaiting on his low seat the materials on which he was to employ his skill. The bald, yellow- mantled priest of Budboo passed on amidst obeisances in one place, as did the Catholic pastor in another. The white-vested Mahomedan, the turbaned Bin- doo, the swathed Malay merchants, exhibited their stores, or looked passively on the gay scene. The quiet Dutchman from the south sent a keen glance through the market in questof preciousstones in the hands of an ignorant or indolent vender. The haughty Candian abated his fierceness, and stepped out of the path of the

European; the stealthy Cingalese was in no one's path, but won his way like a snae in the tall grass of the jungle. The restless lessees of the banks, meanwhile, were flitting near the boats, now ranged in a long row, each with its platform, ropes and pullies ; each with its sharkbinder, its pilot, its com- mander, its crew of ten, and its company of ten divers. The boat-lights were being kindled, one by one, and scattering a thousand sparkles over the rippling

tide. It was just on the stroke of ten, and the signal-gun,was all that was waited for. The buzz of voices fell into a deep silence as the expectation became more intense. Those who were wont to make the heavens their clock and the stars its hour-hand, looked up to mark the precise inclination of the Southern Cross ; while those who found an index in the flow of the tide, paced the sands from watermark to watermark. Yet more turned their faces southward towards the dark outline of hill and forest that rose on the horizon, and watched for the land breeze. It came,—at first in light puffs which scarcely bowed the rushes around the lagoons, or made a stir among the stalks in the rice-ground. Moment by moment it strengthened, till the sails of the boats began to bulge, and every torch and fagot of cocoa-nut leaves on the beach slanted its forks of flame towards the eea, as if to indicate to the voyagers their way. Then the signal- ' gun boomed, its wreath of smoke curled lazily upward and dispersed itself in the clear air ; while a shout, in which every variety of voice was mingled, seemed to chase the little fleet into the distance. The shouting ceased amidst the anxiety of watching the clusters of receding lights, which presently looked as if they had parted company with those in the sky, and had become a degree less pure by their descent. Then rose the song of the dancing-girls, as they stood grouped, each with a jewelled arm withdrawn from beneath her mantle, and her jet-black hair bound with strings of pearl. Mixed with their chaunt, came the mutter- ings and gabbliogs of the charmers who remained on shore, contorting their bodies more vehemently than would have been safe on any footing less stable than terra-firma. The most imposing part of the spectacle was now to the people at sea. As their vessels were impelled by an umutermitting wind through the calmest of seas, they were insensible to motion ; and the scene, on shore, with its stir and its sound, seemed to recede like the image of a phantasmagoria, till the flickering lights blended into one yellow haze, in which every distinct ehject was lost. It became at length like a dim star, contrasting strangely in brightness and in hue with the constellation which appeared to rise as rapidly as majestically over the southern hills, like an auxiliary wheeling his silent force to restore the invaded empire of night. Night now had here undisputed sway ; for the torches which flared at tl:e prows of the boats were tokens of homage, and not attempts at rivalshin of her splendours. Sailing is neatly as calculable a matter on these expeditions as a journey of fifty miles in an English mail-coach. There is no need to think about the du- ration of tin darkness, in a region where the days and nights never vary more than fifteen minutes from then-equal length ; and as for a fair wind, if it is cer- tain that there will be one to carry you straight out at ten to. night, it is equally certain that there will be an opposite one to bring you straight in before noon to-morrow. Nature here saves you the trouble of putting engine and paddle- box into your boat, in order to be able to calculate your going forth and your return. By the time the amber haze in the east was parting to disclose the glories of a tropical sunrise, the fleet was stationed in a circle over the banks; and on each side of every platform stood five men, every one with his foot slung on the pyramidal stone, whose weight must carry him nine fathoms down into the regions of monstrous forms and terrifying motions.

Let us next—holding in our breath the while—accompany the

DESCENT OF KAYO, THE PEARL-DIVER.

The splash of the thousand men who descended within the circle took away his breath as effectually as the closing waters were about to deprive him of it.

It was a singular sight to see the half of this vast marshalled company thus sud- denly engulfed, and to think of them, in one moment after, as forming. a hu-

man population at the bottom of the sea. To be a subject of the experiment, was to the full as strange as to witness it ; as Rayo found, when the minute of his companions' submersion was at length over, and a thousand faces (very

nearly scarlet, notwithstanding their tawny'skins) rushed up. through the green wave. Spouting, dripping, and panting, they convulsively jerked their burden of oysters out upon the platform, and then tried to deliver their news from the regions below; but for this news their comrades must not wait. Down went Rayo, to find out the difference between three fathoms and nine. How far the lively idea of a shark's row of teeth might have quickened his perceptions, he did not himself inquire; but he was conscious of a more dazzling flash before his eyes, a sharper boring of the drum of his ear, and a general pressure so much stronger than ever before, that it would have been easy for him to believe, if he had been a Hindoo, like ids neighbours, that he supported the tortoise that sup- ported the elephant that supported the globe. He could see nothing at first in the dizzy green that was suffocating and boiling him; but that did not signify, as he had no time to look shout him. He thought he was descending clean into a shark's jaws, so sharp was that against which his left great-toe struck, when his descent from the ninth heaven to the ninetieth abyss was at length accom- plished. (How could any one call it nine fathoms?) On meeting this shark's tooth, or whatever else it was, yelling was found to be out of the question. It was luckily forgotten in the panic, that the rope was to be pulled in case of ac- cident ; luckily, as there was no alternative between Rayo's losing all credit as a diver, and the fishing being at an end for that day, from his spreading the alarm of a shark. He did not pull the rope; he only pulled up his left leg vigorously enough to assure himself that it was still in its proper place; by which time he discovered that he had only mistaken a large gaping oyster for a hungry shark. Rayo's great-toe being not exactly the viand that this oyster had a long- ing for, it ceased to gape - and Rayo manfully trampled it under foot, before wrenching it from the abode of which its seven years' lease had this day expired. These oysters required a terrible wrenching, considering that there was no tak- ing, breath between. Now he had got the knack. A pretty good handful, that ! —St. Anthony ! where did that slap in the face come from—so cold and stun- ning? Rayo's idea of a buffet from the Devil was, that it would be hot; so he took he trt, and supposed it was a fish, as indeed it was. He must go now,- 0 ! 0 ! he must go. He should die now before he could get up through that immeasurable al:yss. But where was the rope? St. Anthony ! where was the rope? He was lost ! No ! it was the rope slapped his face this time. Still he was lost! A shadowy, striding mountain was coining upon him,—too enormous to be any fish hut a whale. Suppose Rayo should be the first to see a whale in these seas! St. Anthony ! it was one of his companions. If they were not gone up yet, could not he stay an instant longer, and so avoid being made allow- ance for as the youngest diver of the party? No, not an instant. He rather thought he must be dead already, for it was hours since he breathed. He was alive enough, however, to coil himself in the rope. Then he went to sleep for a hundred years; then,—what is this? dawn? A green dawn ?—brighter, --lighter,--vistas of green light everywhere, with wriggling forms shooting from end to end of them. Pah ! here's a mouthful of ooze. Rayo should not have opened his mouth. Here is the air at last! Rayo does not care; the wa- ter does as well by this time. If he is not dead now, water will never kill him, for he has been a lifetime under it.

" Well, Rayo," says the captain, "you have done pretty well. for the first time. You have been under water a full minute, and one man is up before you. Here comes another."

"A full minute!"

Even so. Who has not gone through more than this in a dream of less than a minute? and yet more if he has been in sudden peril of instant death, when the entire life is lived over again, with the single difference of all its events being contemporaneous? Since it is impossible to get into this position voluntarily, let him who would know the full worth of a minute of waking existence, plunge nine fathoms deep,—not in the sandy ooze of a storm-vext ocean, where he might as well be asleep for any thing that he will see,—but in some translucent region which Nature has chosen for her treasury.

Rayo had rediscovered one of the natural uses of air ; but he was in despair at the prospect before him. Forty or fifty such plunges as this to-day ! and as many more to-morrow, and almost every day for six weeks Forty or fifty lifetimes a day for six weeks !

Rayo yields to temptation, and swallows a large pearl, " such as would build a boat as well as a house, and make Martina look like a bride indeed ;" and " which pearl Rayo believed no more -than the proper payment of his labour, considering that strangers carried away all the profit from the country-people." Suspicion immediately attaches to him : an emetic—" an ample stock of emetics being the part of the apparatus of pearl-fishing least grudged by speculators "—confirms his larceny. He quits the coast, and, accompanied by his wife, goes " to the cocoa-trees down among the cinnamon gardens." Here cocoa-nuts could generally be gotten, but they sicken under the diet. Rayo's strength wastes. His wife is attacked by the ague.

And it was but seldom she could snare a fowl.

Did not her husband bring home game, or earn money, or grow rice? He brought home little game, for want of means to take it ; he could not grow rice, as he had neither land nor seed; and as for earning money, how was it possible for a stranger to do so, when so many residents were already unem- ployed?

In the mean time, a drought takes place ; a famine follows; and death is busy amongst the Cingalese. The causes and effects of their miseries are beautifully described in the following extract, which exhibits the

RESULTS OF THE PROTECTIVE SYSTEM ON THE NON-PROTECTED. RESULTS OF THE PROTECTIVE SYSTEM ON THE NON-PROTECTED.

If the drought had been confined to the western coast of Ceylon, its effects would have been very deplorable, from the poverty of the people, though, from their being in the habit of the regular importation of rice, they were more sure of some extent of supply than if they had been dependant on their own scanty crops. But this year the drought extended to some of the districts of the neighbouring country, from which rice was annually imported to a large amount. This, again, would have mattered little, if the inhabitants had had the means of purchasing from a greater distance ; but these means could not be within the leach of a colony whose productions were monopolized by the mother country. Hundreds of thousands of the inhabitants of Ceylon, who, if allowed the usual inducements to an accumulation of capital, would have been in common times purchasers of the innumerable comforts which the world yields, and in the worst seasons placed far above the reach of want, were reduced by a single delay of the monsoon to such a condition as rendered it doubtful whether they would ever be purchasers of any thing. Again, want of capital was the grievance from which all other temporal grievances arose in this region of natural wealth and superabundant beauty ; and this want of capital was caused by the diver- sion of labour from its natural channels, through the interference of the evil spirit of monopoly. Streams ran down from the mountains ; and on either side of the streams were levels which ]ay waste and bare for want of irrigation ; and on the banks of these streams lived a population which subsisted on unwholesome and noses- soned or deficient food. These waters could not be made useful, these plains could not be fertilized, these people could not be fed, because the natural wealth of the country was not permitted to create capital to the inhabitants.

The cotton-tree might be met with growing luxuriantly wherever the hand of man or of nature had caused it to take root; yet those who lived within, reach of its boughs hid themselves in the woods for the scantiness of their clothing, or went without some other necessary, in order to furnish themselves expensively with cotton-cloth which had been woven four thousand miles ofE. That it should be woven where it was, and sold where it was, was well; but that the purchasers should not have the raw materials to exchange for the wrought, or something else to offer which should not leave them destitute, spoke ill for the administrators of their affairs.

Potters' clay abounded in the intervals between soils which offered some- thing better ; and here and there a rude workman was seen " working his work on the wheel," as in the days of Jeremiah the prophet, and marring the clay, and making another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter. It would have seemed good to him to make better vessels, to improve his craft, and bring up his children to the art, and supply households at a greater distance with utensils, and get wealth and contentment, but that he had no money to spend on improvements, and that if his children tried to get any, they could find no free scope for their enterprise.

Herds of buffaloes were seen feeding amidst the rank vegetation of the hills ; and many a peasant would have gone among them, morning and evening, with his bottle of hide slung over his shoulder, and many a maiden with her vase poised upon her head, if a free commerce in ghee had been permitted with the Arabs, who must drink a cupfull of it every morning, and with the multitude of dwellers in the Eastern Archipelago, who want it for,auointings, for food, for sacrifice, and other purposes which now cost them dear. But the buffaloes might graze in peace, the peasants being permitted to sell ghee only to those who could not buy, or who did not consume ghee. There were cocoa-nut fibres enough to spin a coir rope which might measure the equator ; but coir was so taxed, as soon as it became rope, that the Govern- ment need have little fear that any one would buy but itself, and those who could get no cheaper cordage. Chay-root, yielding the red dye which figures on Indian chintses, spread it- self far and wide through the light dry soil near the coast. How it should hurt the British Government that all nations should have red roses on their chintzes, had not been satisfactorily explained ; but it was the will of that Government

that few should do so. The Government bought up every ounce of chay-root which its Cingalese subjects were obliging enough to sell. There was much loyalty in thus furnishing chay-root ; the diggers being paid a good deal less than half the price which the Government demanded from its purchasers:

The fragrance of spices was borne on every breeze ; shells of various beauti- ful forms were thrown up by every tide ; tortoiseshell might be had for the trouble of polishing, and ivory for that of hunting the elephant ; arrack flowed

for any one who would set it running from the tree; canes to make matting and baskets were trodden down from their abundance; the topaz and the amethyst,

the opal, the garnet, the ruby, and the sapphire, jet, crystal, and pearls, were strewed as in fairy-land ; the jack-wood, rivalling the finest mahogany, ebony, satin-wood, and the finely veined calaminda, grew like thorns in the thicket;

yet the natural proprietors of this wealth, to which the world looked with longing eyes, were half-fed and not clothed ; and their English fellow-subjects, located in a fur less favourable habitation, were taxed to afford them such meagre support as they had. The world had rolled back with the Cingalese. Monuments were before them at every step, which showed that their country had been more populous than now, and their forefathers more prosperous than themselves. • They were . now too many for their food—too many for the labour which their mitts vouch-, stuffed to call for ; yet they were but a million and a half on a territory which

had sustained in more comfort a much greater number, without taxing a distant

nation to give unproductive aid to a puny people, and before the advantages of national interchange liaci6been fully ascertained. There were traces of times—

before the English artisan was called upon to contribute his mite to his tawny brother over the sea; before the Government complained of the expense of its Colony ; before murmurs arose about the scanty supply of cinnamon, while the Honourable Company was claiming compensation for an over-supply ; before the rulers at Columbo began to he at their wits' end to find means for keeping up their credit ; before the expenditure of the colony so far exceeded its revenue, as that the inquiry began among certain wise ones, where was the great advan- tage of having a colony, which, however rich in name and appearance, cost more than it produced—there were traces of happier times, when the world seemed

to have been wiser, however younger, than at present ; or when the Cingalese had been under a wiser sway than that which was now calling upon them for perpetual submission and gratitude. The Dutch might have been hard task- masters; but it was now felt that the English were yet more so; and, however much submission might be yielded, because it could not be refused, there was

small room for gratitude, as any one who would have admitted who could have drawn an accurate comparison between the condition of the foreign and the native, the producing and the commercial, population of the western portion of the island during this season of hardship. The Dutch-built houses, inhabited by foreign agents, displayed all their usual luxuries; carpeted with fragrant mats, gemmed with precious stones, perfumed with spicy oils, and supplied with food and.driuks purchased by native produce from foreIgn lands. The huts of their humbler neighbours, meanwhile, were bare alike of furniture and food, and, for the most part, empty of inhabitants. The natives of Eastern countries seem to find consolation in the open air in times of extreme hardship ; not only laying their sick on the banks of rivers, but gathering together in hungry groups by the road-side or by the sea-shore,

in times of famine, gazing patiently on the by which is carried before their eyes, and waiting for death as the sun goes down. Such were the groups now seen on the shores of the Lake of Columbo, and in many an open space among the spoiled paddyLfields ; while the foreigners, from whom they were wont to re- ceive their pittance, were engaged with their curries, their coffee, and their meats from many climes. Thus was it during the day ; while at night the distribution of action was reversed. The foreigners slept at ease in their cooled and darkened apartments, or, if they could not rest, had nothing worse to com- plain of than a mosquito foe; while their native neighbours were silently fiwining- funeral piles along the shore ; silently bringing more wood and more from the thickets, as others of their caste dropped dead at length ; silently laying out the corpses; silently watching them as they turned to ashes, and placing the limbs decently as they fell asunder ; silently arranging themselves so that the funeral fire played in their dark eyes' and shone on their worn and lanky frames : silently waiting till the morning breeze puffed out the last flickering flame and dispersed the handful of white ashes which was all that remained of the parent who had murmured his blessing at sunset, or the wife who had whispered her farewell at midnight, or the infant whose breath had parted at the summons of the dawn. Silently were these rites performed ; insomuch that any chance-watcher in the neighbouring verandah heard no other interruption to the splash of waters than the crackling of flames, and would not have guessed that bands of patient suf- ferers were gathered round this fearful sacrifice to the evil spirit of Monopoly— a sacrifice as far from appeasing the demon as from testifying to the willing ho- mage of his priests. There were not among the gentle Cingalese. any (4* the fierce passions which this daemon commonly delights to unleash among his vie- time; none of the envy, jealousy, and hatred with which the desperately mise- rable enhance their desperation and their misery. Instead of jostling one an- other, these sufferers sat side by side ; instead of gnashing. their teeth at each other, they were altogether heedless of neighbourhood ; instead of inflicting in- juries, they merely ceased to confer mutual benefits. No aged man complained of violence, bbt sank down disappointed, when he found the water-pot—placed for the traveller's refreshment—empty by the way-side. No wearied woman murmured at being dislodged from the sheltered bench on the bridge ; but nei- ther did those, who had niched themselves there to seek forgetfidness in sleep, stir to make way for a fellow-sufferer. No child was driven from its chance meal by a stronger urns than its own ; but neither was there a look of a word to spare for the little ones (more tenacious of life than their parents), who crept from their dead mother to their dying father, trying in vain to suck life from the sunken breasts of the one, and to unclose the fixed eyes of the other. Some who remained in their habitations in the woods, if less destitute, were not less miserable. If the sight and scent of the bread-fruit were too strong for the fortitude of some, they ate under the full conviction that they were exchanging famine for leprosy. Whether the belief in this effect of the fruit was right or wrong, those who believed and yet ate suffered cruelly for the want of rice. If a follower of Brama, in passing a ruin, saw a cow browsing on some pinnacle, and, in a fit of desperation, called the sacred creature down to be made food of, he found himself gnawed by the consciousness of his inexpiable crime as fear- fully as by his previous hunger. Au ample importation of rice—such as might always be secured by the absence of restrictions on commerce—would have saved to these the pangs of conscience, till a better knowledge had had time to strike root and ripen fur harvest, as it would have spared to others the agonies of hunger while their rice-grounds were awaiting the latter rains, and preparing

i to become fruitful again in their season. As it was, all were prevented making the most of their own soil from want of capital ! and, while rendered dependant on the importation of grain, were denied the means of insuring that importa- tion. By the exorbitant taxation of some of their articles of produce, and the prohibition to sell others to any buyer but the Government, the Cingalese were deprived of all chance of securing a subsistence, and of all inducement to accu- mulate property. • •

One more extract, and we have done. It is a scene which might in substance be paralleled without travelling as far as Ceylon.

Few indeed were the places in the island where there were no struggles of poverty by day, or of death by night. In Rayo's hut, the poverty-struggle seemed to be drawing near a close and that of death impending. There needed the agency of no hag to touch the dwellers in the jungle with leprosy; no curse from above to make them feel as outcasts in their own land. The sunny days and starlight nights of the dry season were full of dreariness. Rayo, now the victim of leprosy in its most fearful form, passed the day in solitude,—now creeping from his mat to his threshold, and there finding that his swollen limbs would carry him no further ; now achieving with much toil, his daily walk in search of the honeycomb of the hollow tree, or of any windfall of the fruit he could no longer climb to reach. The pitcher-plant grew all around his hut, and regularly.performed its silent service of preparing the limpid draught to sa- tisfy his feverish longing; but the monkeys were now too strong for ham ; and often, in a state of desperate thirst, he saw a pert ape, or an insolent baboon, twist the green cup from its tendril, and run up a tree with it, or upset the draught before his eyes. If ever he got far enough to look out upon the open landscape, it stirred his spirit to see the herds of buffaloes on the hill-side, and the proud vessels on the distant main, bringing luxuries from many a clime ; feeling, as he did, that the food and the wine thus exhibited to him would have preserved him from his disease, and kept 3Iarana, in all her youth and strength, by his side. If be met a countryman with whom to speak, his tumultuous thoughts were not calmed ; for he heard tell of the high price which cinnamon bore this season, on account of the lucky damage done by liglitniug to the crop. To him and his countrymen it signified little whether the Honourable Company Were enabled to ask ti;' prices of such a scarce season as this, or whether they sought from Government a compensation for a loss occasioned by an over-supply ; Rayo and his countrymen had no part nor lot in the hateests of their native island ; but Rayo had in the concerns of the rulers the deep stake of unsatisfied revenge. As often us he became sensible of a new loss of strength, as often as any of the horrible symptoms of efephantiasis met his conaciosatiesa, he drew sharp and brief iuferences respecting the philosophy of Colonization', which might have been worthy the ear of a British Parliament, if they could:have been echoed so far over the sea.

The management of Ceylon is now in the hands of dm State, The monopoly of the pearl-fishery is retained, but that of cinna-

mon is abolished ; and, under the auspices of Sir ROBERT Wit-. MOT HORTON, many other improvements have taken place. But monopolies and restrictions of a similar nature, and working in. the long run very similar effects (though the symptoms may differ with the different social conditions of the people upon whom they operate), are still existent in Hindostan, and in all our Colonies.

Nay, " Mutato nomine, de nobis Tabula narratur." Are there no

hands idle, no fertile lands lying waste, in the East of Europe or the South of America, because we virtually prohibit the importa- tion of the corn of one region, and of the sugar, coffee, chocolate, and spices of the other ? Are there no pale-faced mechanics starving and rusting in idleness ; or pining upon half-employ-

ment ; or with their children labouring " from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof,' and yet barely earning a suffici- ency to support existence ; though the agriculturists of Poland and Russia would gladly supply them with sufficient food, and the planters of Brazil with yet untested luxuries? Are there no sailors lounging about our ports, exemplifying their own proverb, and enjoying " a dog's life, ease and hunger," willing to fight for any man, or even, as the spokesman of Don MinueL's condot- tieri said, for the Enemy of mankind, rather than starve; although the importation of foreign raw produce, and the consequent ex- portation of British manufactures, might, under a less restricted system, find employment for them all? Are there no capitalists living in apparent luxury and splendour, and " faring sumptu- ously every day," but whose splendours are mockery to a ha- rassed mind, and whose fare is rendered distasteful by the anxie- ties of a large family, from (unromantic origin !) the difficulty of finding a field for the profitable employment of capital, and from the strug:gles—fiercer than over pearl-fisher waged—to maintain caste and credit upon insufficient means,:? And are there. none who perish prematurely in the struggle'? Or, amidst the general difficulties and derangements springing from our system of pro- tecting the few at the cost of the many, and limiting the field for the employment of industry, are there, among that numerous class who depend for their subsistence upon their personal exer- tions, no unwilling disciples of MALTHUS; who work to meet the wants of the day that is passing over them ; whose visions of youth are gradually dissipated before the stern realities of life ; and who, when the " hope deferred that maketh the heart sick" is at length exchanged for assured disappointment, either live on with soured tempers and injured health, or (if a man) sink into the slough of low sensuality, or die, nominally from an early break-up of constitution, in reality from a broken heart ? And lastly, are there none of these, or of the other classes in middling life, who are now paying the penalty of " loving, not wisely, but too well," in a constant shift to maintain a family with outward decency, or in a hopeless struggle with narrow circumstances or pecuniary embarrassments ; who see their children sinking from their own station into a lower sphere; or who die, and leave them to the tender mercies of a world, not perhaps naturally hard, but where the majority of us are too much occupied with our own difficulties to exercise much active sympathy for those of others ? But what are these things to the rulers of na- tions; and who can expect that they should be troubled to endea- vour at their remedy ! They are busy, and may not be " embar- rassed." The Treasury has its jobs to manage. A place must be found for a young gentleman—a contract for a middle-aged Mem- ber; an active public servant must be unwillingly superannuated, in order that his office may be filled. Or a troublesome motion is on the book, and a House must not be formed. Or it muy be, a resolution must be evaded, lest it should have the effect of forcing on the consideration of the Corn-laws, or of depriving Lord EL- LENBOROUGH, and such as he, of their sinecures, or Mrs. AR- BUTHNOT, and the " likes of her," of their pensions. If we look to individuals, Lord GREY is engaged in propitiating his Order; his son-in-law is bent upon " spiting CHURCH ;" Lord ALTHORP has an excuse to offer, or (a very difficult matter) to " explain what he really did mean ; " Mr. RICE is deep in a calculation on the Stamp Act (more preposterously exaggerated on the one side than was the Member for Oldham's on the other); whilst Mr. STANLEY has to insult an opponent, or to insinuate a calumny against a defenceless public servant, which, if true, would not only deprive him of character, but even of bread. Nay, when a part of the Monopoly question actually forces itself upon them, they give it—not a comprehensive consideration, but—twenty mil- lions of the public money. They did not even avail themselves of the twin opportunities which Colonial Slavery and the East India Company's Charter afforded them for freeing Hindostan from the unfair and burdensome " protective duties" which oppress her people. by crippling their industry.