"It is powerful, and has been powerful for a long time; but there are other interests besides the landed interest now."
"Well, there is the colonial interest, and the shipping interest," said Mr. Ferrars, "and both of them thoroughly with us."
"I was not thinking of them," said his companion. "It is the increase of population, and of a population not employed in the cultivation of the soil, and all the consequences of such circumstances that were passing over my mind."
"Don't you be too doctrinaire, my dear Sydney; you and I are practical men. We must deal with the existing, the urgent; and there is nothing more pressing at this moment than the formation of a new Government."
The closing sentence is characteristic. While political partisanship engrosses the thoughts and time of those on whom rest the duties of Government, the material treasure of the country yearly decreases,[1] pauperism and profligacy, born and nourished of overcrowding and corruptions now part and parcel of urban and industrial surroundings, increase. There is but one human practicable method of stemming a current that bears us on faster and faster towards an abyss; one so imperatively, urgently wanted, so obviously effective, that it would be inconceivable why statesmen do not unitedly proclaim its value, why the people themselves do not clamorously insist upon its adoption, unless we knew, from the history of the Deluge and the Ark, that it is not enough either to forewarn, or to point out the sole way of escape even from stupendous and certain and imminent destruction.
Shortly before the inauguration of free trade, on April 6, 1843, Mr. Charles Buller, in the House of Commons, proposed the following motion—"that an humble address be presented to her Majesty praying that she will take into her most gracious consideration the means by which extensive and systematic colonization may be most effectually rendered available for augmenting the resources of her Majesty's Empire; giving additional employment to capital and labour, both in the United Kingdom and in the colonies, and thereby bettering the condition of her people." Nothing came of this enlightened
- ↑ The golden tide that had as a rule flowed towards these shores down to 1878 inclusive, then began to ebb, and from our store of gold and silver bullion and specie ten millions of pounds sterling have since gone abroad. If fifteen millions be added to them to represent loss, waste, depreciation, wear and tear of coinage in circulation in 1879—1882, we see a total reduction of twenty-five million pounds sterling in the stock of precious metals in the country at the end of 1878, when the census was considerably lower than at the end of 1882.
