but when the whole case with all its facts should be before the House, the House would judge of it as a whole, and then he should not fear their verdict-nay, he should scarcely fear the verdict of the noble Lord himself. If the Indian Government, in retiring within its limits, had left anarchy behind them in Affghanistan, it was that anarchy which the invasion of the country by the late Government had originally generated. He lamented the excesses of the Indian army, or rather of the undisciplined mass by which an Indian army is always followed: and he assured the House that nothing was further from the mind of the Governor-General than to countenance the idolatry of the people under his rule. The noble Lord had blamed the Ashburton treaty, as though it would have been easy to conclude a more favourable one; but if that was so easy, why had not the late Government done so in their ten years of Administration? He believed that the territory given up was valueless both in an agricultural and in a military point of view. If Lord Ashburton apprehended the separation of Canada from England, the boundary question, so far from being of less, must have appeared to him of so much the more importance; for when Canada should become a separate state, deprived of England's auxiliary resources, it would be of vital consequence to her to be protected by available limits from the encroachments of the United States.

After bestowing some ridicule upon the contrasted opinions of Lord John Russell and the AntiCorn-Law League, Lord Stanley proceeded to deal with some of Lord John Russell's complaints

against the Income Tax, one of which he declared to have been expressly provided for by the 169th clause of the Act.

Lord Palmerston declared his entire concurrence in Lord John Russell's speech. He claimed for the late Government all the merit of the plans and appointments which had led to success in China, and put some questions which drew from Sir Robert Peel the reply, that M. Guizot had been mistaken in stating, recently, that the English cruisers on the coast of Africa, to the number of eighty had been reduced by one half-the number in the last year was fifty, this year forty-nine.

Sir Robert Inglis would not condemn the general policy of Lord Ellenborough; but he must express his disapprobation of that passage in one of the proclamations in which a Christian Governor, on a subject connected with religion, employed language such as no Mahomedan ruler would suffer himself to use. It was not as Lord Stanley had put it, a mere matter of taste; the Government ought not to take that sort of ground, they ought to discontinue such an officer.

Mr.Villiers complained that the speech disregarded the sufferings of the people at home. It would not do to say there were no remedies. Remedies there were, expected and desired by the people. They would not be satisfied with what had passed that evening. Sir Robert Peel had uttered nothing that looked like an intention to repeal the Corn Laws, and the people were now therefore in a hopeless state, and the excitement of the country was general.

Lord Howick announced that if he were not fully anticipated, he

should at an early day call the attention of the House distinctly to the existing distress, with a view to procure an explicit declaration whether any legislative remedy could be found for it or not.

Mr. Hume approved the treaty with America, and hailed the peace with China as likely to produce the greatest advantage to the country; he urgently called upon Sir Robert Peel for "a second Tariff," and threatened to turn his back upon him, as he had upon Lord John Russell, for asserting the doctrine of finality.

Mr. Ferrand made some severe observations respecting the manufacturers, and declared there would be no protection for the poor, unless machinery were taxed. Not only the manufacturing districts were in a state of ruin, but the agricultural districts also.

Mr. Ewart censured the sweeping generality of Mr. Ferrand's imputations, and asked if he meant to include all manufacturers? (Mr. Ferrand intimated that he did not.) Mr. Ewart proceeded to argue in favour of free trade

in general, and recommended in particular the reduction of the duties on tea and sugar, the opening of the trade with Ceylon, and, above all, an alteration of the Corn Laws.

Mr. Milner Gibson argued to shew that Sir Robert Peel must inevitably give his consent to a total repeal of the Corn Laws; and condemned his holding out to the occupying tenantry the potion, that without a repeal of the present duties, it would be possible for them much longer to employ their capital safely in the cultivation of corn-land.

Mr. Brotherton followed on the same side, and asked whether Mr. Ferrand, in proposing to tax or abolish machinery, intended to include the plough and the harrow.

Sergeant Murphy, Dr. Bowring and Mr. Mark Philips followed on the same side; and Mr. George Bankes spoke in favour of the Government.

The motion for presenting the Address was then put, and agreed to, without a division, and the House adjourned.

country which has so long prevailed, and which Her Majesty has so deeply lamented." He then moved, that the House do now resolve itself into Committee upon the passage of Her Majesty's Speech, which had just been read, and supported the Motion in a Speech of great length. His object was to call on the House to pronounce a decided opinion whether the distress under which the country laboured was not of such a character as to impose on them the imperative duty of some legislative interference with respect to it.

He disclaimed all hostility to the present Government in bring ing forward the Motion, and only regretted that they had not further carried out the principles which had been so ably expounded by Mr. Gladstone and Sir Robert Peel the year before. He believed that the situation of the country was one of great danger, but that Parliament had it in their power to avert the overwhelming evils with which they were threatened. He admitted at once, however, that the House ought not to assent to the Motion except with the view to a practical result. He described the actual state of the country the time was now to be reckoned, not by months, but by years, during which the manufacturing and commercial industry of the country had been in a state, to use Her Majesty's words, of depression. That distress which, in the first instance, affected only one great branch of the national industry, had lately-as must, in his opinion, always be the case— extended its operation to all others. It could not be questioned that the agricultural interest was now suffering great depression. He believed that honourable Gentlemen

opposite would not contest the truth of his assertion when he said, that the agricultural interest was in a state of great depression and distress-that depression arising from the diminished consumption of some of the most important articles of produce. The consequence was, that the farmers were everywhere exposed to very great difficulties-that, in many parts of the country, these difficulties extended from them to the agricultural labourers, whose wages had, in several districts, been materially reduced; and even where wages had suffered no reduction there was, he believed, almost universally, a growing scarcity of employment, often seriously aggravated by the return to the rural districts of numbers of men who, in more prosperous times, had for years obtained ample employment in the great seats of our commerce and manufactures. The mining and shipping interests of the country more than participated in the general pressure of distress. The retail tradesmen and shopkeepers, both in the metropolis and throughout the kingdom, were in a similar unfortunate condition. These classes were exposed to great difficulties by the increasing weight of the poor-rates; and it was well known that in many towns, in the course of the last summer, it had become a matter of no inconsiderable difficulty to collect those rates. But the classes to which he now referred were suffering also from most frightful diminutions in their business; diminutions which naturally followed from the reduced earnings of the working classes, as well as from the diminished incomes of persons in higher and more wealthy stations. Indeed, a large proportion

even of the more wealthy classes were directly or indirectly dependent for their incomes on the prosperity of some branch or other of the national industry; they, too, were beginning-though he feared at the present they were only beginning to feel the effects of the present lamentable state of affairs; and even those whose incomes had not at once been affected by the prevalent distress had been exposed to that reduction of income which was occasioned by a new and direct demand to meet the exigencies of the public service. The consequence was that, whether in the upper ranks or whether in the lower, there was scarcely a family in the country which was not compelled to retrench some former expense, or to give up some luxury or indulgence to which they had formerly been accustomed. Such he believed to be an unexaggerated statement of the actual condition of the country.

This general view Lord Howick supported by details, derived especially from Sunderland, to illustrate the condition of trading towns, and from Northumberland to illustrate that of the rural districts; describing the depressed state of the coal and shipping trades in Sunderland, of the retail trades, the diminished consumption of butchers' meat, the increase of poor rates, the low price of live stock caused by that diminished consumption, the distress of the farmers now beginning to press

the labouring agricultural class, the distress of the retail traders who supply that class, and their difficulty of collecting debts, the aggravated competition in the country from the migration of work people from the distressed

towns, and the increase of casual poor from the same cause. Thence he passed to the deficiency in the Excise, of 1,157,300l. on the year, 717,000l. on the quarter, as a test of the deteriorated condition of the people. He compared the Excise revenue with that of 1840, (that for 1841 having been swelled by the efforts to reduce the balances in the hands of Collectors,) when it amounted to 4,016,000Z., the amount for the last year, 3,022,000l., showing a deficiency of 994,000l. That statement could not be affected by the Temperance movement in Ireland, as the returns related to England alone; but its sole cause must be a forced economy, painful to every class; even the wealthy felt the privation of accustomed luxuries, how much more the poor man compelled to reduce his scanty expenditure! It was awful to think what would have been the distress if the winter had been a hard one; but such a state of things could not continue much longer, without extreme danger to the institutions of the country; and he pointed to the disturbances in the north a warning, and as proof of something radically wrong.

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An historian, whose loss they had lately had occasion to deplore, had observed that the great mass of mankind were so constituted that they could rarely feel serious political distress unless when suffering from personal want, and that they were driven by this cause to feel discontent with the institutions under which they lived, and consequently to become impressed with the desire for change. Now these observations, he thought, were no less just than new; and the cause was traced by that eminent historian

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