1827.] The Rc-assemlling of Parliament. 163 



tilizing dew of heaven, it falls "upon the just and the unjust. 11 Every 

 nation which it has reached, (and where is the nation which it has not, orsball 

 not, to some extent reach?) it must have been like that breathing from the 

 Almighty, which passed over the dry bones in the valley of desolation, clothed 

 them with the lineaments, and ombued them with the power of life. And, 

 at every spot on the earth's surface, where there is a man that can read 

 that which was then spoken, or where what has arisen out of it can reach 

 him, there will be another added to those who desire the spread of 

 intellectual knowledge, and the establishment of rational liberty. Hence 

 there has been laid a foundation, which, while it gives us hope that ero 

 many years have passed away, there will be a reciprocity of kind feelings 

 and peaceful intercourse throughout the civilized world, is precisely that 

 upon which, with the utmost facility and safety, there may he built, during 

 the approaching session, such reforms as may make this country feel 

 light and happy under all its burdens. 



A season when the liberal part of the cabinet stands so transcendently 

 high, when the country, as one man, will support them, when faction of 

 every kind has so got its quietus, and when the most foolish, and the most 

 bigotted, dare hardly moot an opposition may not soon may never 

 again return ; and, therefore, the advantage should not be lost to the 

 country, the good day should not be allowed to pass away, lest when time 

 and death have spoiled us of them in whom we now glory, the night 

 should come in which, to good purposes, no man can work. It is to 

 contribute what in us lies to the furtherance of this noble purpose, that 

 we shall proceed to enumerate a few of the important questions which 

 stand on the parliamentary record for discussion, a few which will be 

 brought, and a few more which should be brought there. 



In the first place, and cotemporaneous almost with the meeting of 

 parliament, arises the question of the com laws ; a question in which tho 

 interests of every man who eats bread, are most deeply concerned, a ques- 

 tion, too, upon which much practical light has recently been thrown. In 

 theory, there never was a time when a man who had any sense or 

 reflection at all in him, could look upon the exclusion of grain from the 

 ports of these kingdoms, as any thing else than a gross and palpable ab- 

 surdity. Even in the remotest and darkest ages of political science, when 

 restriction and restraint wore the fashion of the time, and when men be- 

 lieved that making other men little, was precisely the way to make them- 

 selves great, a restriction on the corn trade was never resorted to. They 

 prohibited the free circulation of many things, but they never had the 

 barbarity to prohibit the free circulation of bread. That was a refinement 

 in folly left for the wise legislators of the age in which we live. And what 

 have been the effects of it? Has it brought the proprietor of the soil out of 

 tho difficulties into which his extravagance had plunged him ? Has it 

 enabled the man whose labours tend to nothing more valuable than the shoot- 

 ing of a pheasant, the worrying of a fox, or the gallopping of a horse to death, 

 to procure wealth, and all the enjoyments which wealth brings, with the 

 same facility, and the same certainty, as the man who establishes a 

 manufacture, gives bread to thousands, enriches and adorns his country, 

 and does the highest honour to his kind ? No the very men who procured 

 this nonsensical law to be enacted, have been, since its enactment, in a 

 worse condition than they were before, it is a law, and an unalterable 

 law of human nature, that the honour shall be to the intelligent, and the 

 wealth to the industrious ; and though as many statutes were enacted a* 



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