ip8 



diate neighbourhood of these cities ; but they have been still 

 more aided by the acceptance of sound economical maxims, 

 by the development of commercial liberty, and by the early 

 acknowledgment of some among the social principles which 

 must needs be admitted before a true progress is possible. 

 To have entered, after so many centuries of repression and 

 monopoly, on the vestibule of the temple of commercial freedom, 

 is indeed a great step. But the continuance of this prosperity 

 must after all be expected in the fuller obedience to those same 

 fundamental principles of freedom whose initiative only has 

 been already taken. If hereafter other regions of the world 

 offer fairer prospects to capital, thither, in the increasing inter- 

 communion of nations, capital will inevitably flow. If here- 

 after the social dignity and material advantages of labour are 

 vindicated in greater measure under other political and econo- 

 mical conditions than those which characterise our polity, 

 thither labour, on which so many circumstances are now 

 conferring mobility and expansion, will inevitably migrate. 

 Hereafter, the whole civilized world will become more and 

 more one nation, governed by international interests, as well 

 as by municipal ordinances. Densely peopled countries will 

 be the cities of the globe, to which its more thinly settled 

 regions will be the source of agricultural and other supply. 

 That the growth of nations, however, should continue in the 

 same course as it has hitherto been exhibited, all the free forces 

 which may stimulate and maintain the existing energies of 

 special or local industry must be discovered and applied, for 

 those regulations which tend only to the advantage of par- 

 ticular classes in a community are sooner or later fatal to its 

 material as well as to its moral progress. 



The first of the tables annexed states the rate at which the 

 wool-tax was assessed on the several English counties in the 

 fifteenth of Edward III. Chester and Durham are omitted, 

 because neither was represented in parliament, and neither 

 was thereupon included in any general assessment. Monmouth, 



