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little exciting as the calm discussions of literature and 

 science. And -when the conflict was at length happily 

 decided in our favour, questions of vast political importance 

 arose, involving no less than the transfer of political power 

 from one class in the State to another. In immediate 

 sequence to those, other questions pressed forward, perhaps 

 still more momentous, whether we regard their fiscal relations 

 as affecting the stability of the state, or their bearings on 

 the material well-being of millions of our fellow-subjects, 

 or lastly the influences they are likely to exert on the 

 intercourse of our country with the other nations of the 

 globe. Subjects such as these have so wholly absorbed the 

 attention of the public, that but little care could be bestowed 

 on those once apparently trivial questions, which, some time 

 ago, seeming as it were but as specks in the horizon, are now 

 looming upon us in all their vastness; while the atmosphere 

 around us is charged with the elements of a coming storm. 

 The attempt to avert its effects can be with safety deferred 

 no longer ; our social evils have grown to such a magnitude, 

 and with such alarming rapidity, that an effort must be made to 

 stay them ; to eradicate them is I fear hopeless. Certain I am, 

 however, that we shall never sink into that deplorable state of 

 apathetic indifference, in which, as has been said of old, " nee 

 vitia nostra, nee remedia pati possunius." Nor should we ; 

 there are many inducements to urge us forward ; the ground 

 before us has been cleared, false systems and specious 

 theories have been one by one put to the test of a searching 

 experience, and eliminated. We must, as politics is to us an 

 experimental science, proceed by the method of " exclusions," 

 so lauded by Bacon as a mediam of discovery in physical 

 investigations. In truth, politics is to us a purely experi- 

 mental science; for though it be granted that its elementary 

 principles are few and plain, admitted with an universality 

 almost metaphysical, and as immutable as the nature of man, 

 yet in the applications of those principles to practice, what 



