128 The Year 1830. [FEB. 



private and public enjoyment of affluence, influence, and security ? The 

 most industrious, strong minded, and fully educated population of the 

 world inhabit her island. She has the finest opportunities for commerce, the 

 most indefatigable and sagacious efforts and contrivances for every neces- 

 sity or luxury of mankind ; inexhaustible mines of the most valuable 

 minerals, and almost the exclusive possession of the most valuable of 

 them all, coal ; a singularly healthy and genial climate, where the 

 human form naturally shapes itself into the most complete beauty and 

 vigour; a situation the most happily fixed by Providence for a great 

 people destined to influence Europe : close enough to the continent to 

 watch every movement, and influence the good or peril of every king- 

 dom of it from Russia to Turkey, and yet secured from the sudden shocks 

 and casualties of European war by the Channel, of all defences the 

 cheapest, the most permanent, and the most impregnable ! 



Why should there be a stop in the career of such a nation ? If such 

 a nation is not at the head of every thing, are we to lay the blame on the 

 wind or the moonshine ? If we see every bounty of nature and mind 

 blunted, and turned into the source of some public misfortune ; are we to 

 say that this is done without some blunder somewhere, without some 

 peevish pertinacity in folly ; unless we take refuge in the theory, that it 

 has been visited on us by the curse of Providence ? 



Do we look to the continent ? There every province has been ravaged 

 by war within the last twenty years. Yet, there is not a spot from 

 Calais to Gibraltar, in which an Englishman might not live with more 

 command of every bounty of the earth than in the richest county of 

 England. Every kingdom of the continent has seen its treasury robbed 

 by an invading army, or wasted with requisitions, and the enormous 

 expences that war brings in its train. Yet in all those kingdoms there 

 is not at this moment so great a difference between the expenditure and 

 the revenue, as in powerful, commercial, sovereign England. 



To come to particulars as to our revenue. In the year 1829, its defal- 

 cation was one million one hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds ! 

 What it must be this year may be conjectured from the fact of a loss of 

 upwards of one hundred thousand pounds already ; notwithstanding 

 all the proverbial dexterity of the Exchequer Bill contrivances, and the 

 infinite puzzling of the long-winded affairs that they call Treasury 

 Accounts. 



But let us see the contrast of those rude financiers across the Atlantic. 

 The American treasury has an actual surplus of. revenue above all 

 demands ; is actually paying off its public debt ; and has a balance laid up 

 against the time when it may be convenient to send out a fleet to ride off 

 Liverpool, or the mouth of the Thames ! 



Such is the answer to the cry that all the world is distressed like our- 

 selves. The cry is a mystification. Are we to be told that commerce 

 has been unfortunate ? Where is the fault, but in our own new-fangled 

 laws ? If the Continental States have resumed their own little carrying 

 trade, we have the whole uncontested range of the ocean, spreading with 

 all its arms round the world. America is the only competitor, upon her own 

 coasts. But who contests with us in the whole of the Spanish colonies, 

 the West Indies, Canada, the magnificent range of the Indian Ocean, 

 Hindostan, the Isles, China ? 



Is the interest of the national debt the solution of the enigma ? But 

 what is even the enormous sum of thirty millions a-year, to a country into 

 whose bosom every corner of the earth pays tribute, and whose annual 



