Italy; and we may look forward to the South American kingdoms, and independent Canada, and Australia, as countries destined to overtop her. It will be said, Englishmen are braver, more enterprising and skilful, than other people; more thoughtful and long-sighted. That would be a poor argument, and a presumptuous one, as regards Frenchmen and Americans, and would be no argument at all against Australians and Canadians, both being Saxon. But if it were a solid ground for hope, how is it that those superior qualities can be brought into play? Why, surely, by subtle contrivances of policy, which will give them free scope. What are those contrivances? Commercial treaties, supported by arms; that is the policy which has, and the only policy which can, raise a small country, like England, to be the head of the world. How else has she risen? Can it be supposed that a plain, unambitious policy of merely exchanging productions with other nations will raise her, or keep her, above her natural level? No! she must use her subtilty to overreach other nations, and her energy and courage to maintain her superiority; and then, with war and overreaching, away goes Free Trade. If courage, energy, and subtilty are laid aside, England sinks, as I said, to a fifth-rate power, because her natural resources are less than those of other nations; and, by Free Trade, she shall teach those who do not know their own resources how to find their value.

"The world is not now as it was two hundred years ago. There are no new countries to discover,—no new sources of riches that can be held in monopoly, or to be found out of the bounds of the civilised world. Look at California. Can the Americans keep it to themselves? All the world goes there. England must then give up her commercial policy, which for centuries, whether good or bad, has certainly been compatible with advancing greatness, and she must start in a new race, with nations superior to her in natural resources, and with the weight of £800,000,000 of debt on her back; and to obtain even a place in this race, proposed by herself, she must break up all her artificial system, with the social relations established under it; thus destroying the fortunes and happiness of multitudes, inviting revolution, and risking the extinction of her debt, which will add hundreds of thousands of miserable broken creditors to the multitude of revolutionists.

"Well, she may survive all this, and, perhaps, be happier within her natural bounds; but she cannot be a great nation; and she has to choose between her present greatness and an uncertain prospect of humbler content, to which she must wade amidst blood and social commotion. But will she be allowed to enjoy that humbler contentment? Will not ambition stir other nations, when they find their power to oppress her? What will her courage avail her then? Modern warfare depends entirely upon mechanical and manufacturing resources, in which her enemies will have a lead over her, because their natural resources are greater, and Free Trade will have taught them how to make the most of them.

"I do not give you all this dogmatically, but I cannot myself see that Free Trade will produce any other results; and I look upon it as certain, that if other nations do not adopt our Free Trade notions, that we cannot put them in practice without destroying the National Debt: in other words, a fatal struggle between the landed and moneyed interest.

"Free Trade for England is, I think, well illustrated by the story of the bear in Marryat's Captain Violet:—'Bruin being up a peach-tree, was vigorously shaking down the fruit for his own eating, but a hog was below very complacently eating the peaches as they fell, and expressing by grunts his satisfaction at the bear's generosity.'—Yours, &c.,

"Feb. 2, 1850. William Napier."

This is ably and manfully spoken. That it is true, is now in the course of such clear demonstration to the nation, that it will ere long bring home conviction to the most prejudiced. But it is a curious fact, illustrative of the truth of the principles we have so long maintained in this Magazine, that such an exposition of the effects which Reform has produced, by vesting the government of the nation in the urban constituencies, should come from a gallant officer, the historian on Whig principles of the Peninsular War, and whose zeal for Reform was known to have been so ardent, that certain proposals were made to him from a certain quarter when "the Bill" was thought to be endangered, which he at once spurned, as might have been expected from a soldier and gentleman of his elevated character.

There is another Napier equally celebrated on another element, whose opinions have been recently as strongly expressed on the effects of Reform, and its offspring Free Trade, on our national defences. All the world is familiar with the energetic letter which Admiral Sir Charles Napier has lately published, on the alarming decline of our naval forces. It may be that our Manchester politicians, and their disciples in the Cabinet, by studying their Trades' Circulars, and occasionally sharpening their intellects by declamations on the hustings on the extravagance of the national armaments, and the expediency of selling our ships of the line and disbanding our troops in anticipation of the millennium which is approaching, are better judges of the probable issue of a land contest than the Duke of Wellington, whose opinion has been equally strongly expressed on the subject, or the historian of, and actor in, the Peninsular War; and of the chances of maritime warfare, than the hero who saved the Turkish empire from dismemberment at Acre, and established the throne of Don Pedro by the victory of Lisbon. That is no doubt possible, though we can hardly regard it as very probable. But if such a catastrophe, as our immortal Field-Marshal and these two very eminent Liberals anticipate, does occur—if Great Britain, cast down to the rank of a fifth-rate power, finds its maritime superiority destroyed, and its colonies lost—if its fleets are blockaded in their harbours, and its manufacturing millions are thrown back on ruined landlords and bankrupt master-manufacturers for their daily bread, let it be always recollected it is no more than has been distinctly foreshadowed to them by those best qualified to form a correct judgment on the subject, and no more than they have brought upon themselves, by their blind adherence to a selfish policy.

To all these disasters, present and future, the Free-traders have one set-off to apply, and that is the increased consumption of food, which they suppose has taken place in the country in consequence of their measures. Sir R. Peel contended strongly that the five million quarters of wheat alone imported in 1849, afforded decisive evidence of the increased wellbeing of the working classes. If the right honourable Baronet will take the trouble to travel through any of the grain districts of the country, he will perceive at once how fallacious this argument is. The barnyards never were so full at this season in any former year. Every farmer has held his stock who was not forced to sell. The nation has, since the last harvest, been fed by foreigners to an unprecedented extent. Ten millions has been sent out of the country to buy foreign wheat, and, of course, lost to British industry. The five million quarters of wheat imported have been less an addition to the national consumption, than a transference of that consumption from British farmers to foreigners. At least a half of the present harvest will be rolled over to next year. If we are blessed with another fine harvest, there will be the crop of a year and a half, besides ten or twelve millions imported in 1851, to stock the market. Prices in all probability will be much lower than they are at present.

We are always reminded that in 1835 prices were