ed one lesson-from the prickly thorn they have plucked one flower -safety. From their flourishing realms and smiling fields they have chased far off the unholy and devouring principles of disunion and disorganization; demagogues will no longer annoy -the orgies of Hambach no more be repeated. We, who bear the cost, can still hail, with all gladness, the bloodless triumph. Anarchy was in the land; England was seen every where else displaying her banners at its head; Germany was assiduously tutored into the conviction that she patronised confusion only to wreak a jealous rival's vengeance on the trophies of her industry. From that hour the troubled waters of civil strife subsided into peace-a common (supposed) foe, on whom to discharge the pent-up storms of national fury was found-one universal cry arose in the father-landVertrauen, Einigkeit-Union, Confidence.

Nothing can better paint the selfish and sinister pretence of Prussian free-trade philosophy, which opens its doors to all, and forbids entrance to none, than the case of Switzerland. The gates of the Germanic Union are closed against her, a near neighbour, and almost an integral portion of the Federation, on two pretexts: the first, that her wares would interfere with those of Saxony; the second, that she is no consumer of German products; she is a seller, but not a purchaser. The one apology is too flimsy to impose upon any one. Surely it is rather Prussia that dreads the competition of Swiss cottons and silks with those of her Rhenane subjects, so excellently and economically facilitated in all seasons by the Rhine navigation, than that Saxony should be so sensitive about a rivalry she has been periodically accustomed to encounter at the Leipsic and Frankfort fairs heretofore. The last excuse would be equally valid as against other members of the Union. What return commerce, for example, can Berlin offer to Munich? The cause, the real cause, is, that Switzerland is too free, too repub lican; Prussia dreads too close contact with a turbulent democracy, which she cannot hope to put down so easily as the legislative outbreaks

of Hesse and Baden. The accession of Holland or Belgium, or both, is a question of greater magnitude and more direct interest to her. It would consolidate her system, which, as yet, has no natural base to rest upon; it would round her empire. For this she was forecasting, as Bulow earwigged the simple secretary of the Foreign Office; for this she viewed with silent complacency the separation of the Netherlands. Belgium has a heavy stake in the solution of this point; she enjoys already a large proportion of the transit trade from this and from other countries to Western Germany, and, with the conclusion of her proposed railway from Antwerp to Cologne, she might perhaps monopolize the whole. She would, moreover, become the great outlet for the fabrics of the Rhenish provinces of Prussia and of other parts of the Union to North and South America-to Cuba, the Indian Archipelago, and China, with all their vast returns. But all this could be the tardy result of time only; Belgium has neither commercial, marine, nor transmarine possessions. It may be doubted also whether Prussia views without dread the formidable concurrence of her cottons, her woollens, her silks, her iron, and her coal, with those of her own western provinces. Elberfeldt may not rejoice in the embraces of Ghent, nor Aix-la-Chapelle fraternize without reluctance with Liege. The discussion, however, and the supposition have not been without their effect at the Tuileries. France, we learn, has hastened to propose at Brussels a custom-house league, founded on the same principles as that of Prussia. We are not prepared to say how the offer has been received, or what may be the special hitch in the affair; but French douaniers, lording it in the port, would hardly look more frightful than French bombardiers raining fire upon the citadel of Antwerp; it is but cause and effect after all. The same eloquence which vindicated the policy of the one to a regenerated but un-English House of Commons, is there still to father his own offspring, and justify the other, if need be, to the entire contentment of O'Connell, or any of his Tail.

Holland, whose manufactures are

too few to excite alarm, which possesses a considerable trading marine, and well-trained seamen, as well as flourishing colonies, will therefore, as combining the elements more in unison with her wants, obtain the preference, and employ all the arts of Prussia to engage her acquiescence, and effect her junction with the Custom-house League. The price, however, is fixed; her colonial possessions are to be thrown open to the Federation, and all restrictions abolished. Some measures have been proposed in the present session of the States-General, touching agriculture, which lead to the suspicion that Holland is paving the way for her initiation. Into speculations upon this event, and upon the new aspect which Europe may hereafter progressively assume, the length to which we have already gone, and the important branches of our subject yet to be treated, forbid us to enter; they are of themselves a theme, and no

unimportant one. Nor shall we, as hitherto we have not, unnecessarily overlay a question, in itself sufficiently momentous, with the entanglements of Eastern policy, and Russian projects. We are anxious to present as succinct and detailed a review as in our power of the practical and prospective bearings of a league so immediately and rudely threatening our best-our material interests; the more so, as the task has not yet, to our knowledge, been attempted with the detail it deserves and demands. The debt of gratitude which Maga has contracted towards the agricultura), manufacturing, and commercial public is surpassingly large. She can only repay it by the circulation (ample, perhaps, beyond comparison) of truths which it concerns them and all to know. Would that the ability were commensurate with the means, or these with the desire!

The praise of the commercial system of Prussia has, for many years past, been the cuckoo note of writers of pamphlets, reviews, and journals,

home and continental, innumerable. The disinterestedness of much of which, and the costliness, may only be estimated approximatively by their results, more or less immediate, in the not over gratuitous accession of Hesse Darmstadt, and the not inexpensive combination of the Prusso Germanic League. But for the too unreflecting and unqualified eulogies of Mr Huskisson, which gave it the stamp of a great authority, that system, with its authors and abettors, bought and unbought, would have been left to be tested by the lessons of experience alone, instead of being decided upon at once by its fair speech propositions. That able statesman, as is often the case with too enthusiastic men, enamoured of principles apparently so congenial with his own, in his examination of their practical application, forgot to penetrate beneath the surface, but accepted all in pure good faith. We may extend our charity towards Prussia, as we have before done, without caring about the returns, but they who blindly put their trust in her with faith and hope, will find, as we have done, that they are leaning on a rotten reed. Among other productions of the trumpettongued school, inspired from Berlin, two are now lying on our table, which more especially invite attention; the one is a "Vindication* of the Commercial Policy of Prussia," by a gentleman holding a very efficient and confidential situation near the person of his Prussian Majesty, and from whom the document came some time since, almost direct into our hands, but whose name we do not feel ourselves at liberty to mention; it is a short but ably written article, and not wanting in a due.portion of sarcasm and bitterness towards England. The other is a pamphlet from the press of Ludwiz Kohnen of Cologne, "On the rise and progress of the Commercial System of Prussia, and the Union of the German States," professing, moreover, like the former, to institute a comparison between the Prussian and British Tariffs,† by C. C. Becher,

late Sub-Director of the Rhenish West India Company. This gentle man commences his comparative statement with denunciations of our navigation laws almost, but not quite so unqualified as those of that profound statesman, Mr Poulett Thom son himself, who has sealed their fate, so far as he is concerned, by declaring that they "have been from the first prejudicial to British commerce. It is not worth the space to expose Mr Becher's misconceptions; he has studied those laws to little purpose, or he is wilfully guilty of the suppressio veri, to represent them to his countrymen as in his pamphlet he does. In like manner, to clear our way and narrow the controversial arena, we shall dismiss with a brief notice various objects of our tariff, lugged in by both writers for no other purpose but effect, since regarding some Prussia can have no grievance to allege, and others are taken out of the category of comparative taxation, unless our excise dues and our drawbacks be also allowed to enter into the account, as they must be, in order to an impartial understanding of the subject. With what reason can she allege, in justification of her own impositions against this, our, in her judgment, onerous exactions upon the produce of other states or of our own colonies? With what right does she assume to stand forth the champion of the four quarters of the world, and to plead our fiscal rigours against others as a plea apologetic for her own towards us? Is she really, then, the avenger of nations, and the sheriff-depute to execute justice? When she exhibits her powers of attorney we shall believe that the United States, and France, and Russia, powerless to resent their own wrongs, have invested her with the Quixotic mission of retaliating exclusive tariffs. The mode and the extent to which we rate tobacco, thrown and figured silks, sail-cloth, or dressed hemp, madder, oil, &c. &c., can surely be no concern of hers, who of those articles for exportation is a non

producer? Moreover, she must sympathize with the West, and remonstrate for the East Indies, on the excessive duties, and discriminating duties, to which they are respectively subjected in their coffee and sugars. We are pleased to pay the penalties of these duties, and we do pay it as the consumers; but as the premium for tolerating her interference, we are quite ready to take our café sucre tax free, if she will undertake, as with Nassau, to guarantee the board of customs. We choose, moreover, to mulet ourselves on soap, starch, glass, paper, hops, refined sugar, &c., with various heavy excise payments, levied for the sake of revenue alone, and therefore entering into the consideration of the cost of those articles on the composition of a tariff of customs for the admission of the same products or manufactures from other countries. When exported, however, a drawback, equivalent or nearly so to the excise, is allowed; deduct the revenue from the protection duty, and the real customhouse tax remains. Upon no other sound basis can a comparison be instituted between the Prussian and the British commercial systems. We might retaliate the argument by showing how France prohibits our cottons, and woollens, and loads our coal and iron with unjustifiable discriminative charges; how Russia shuts out all our fabrics; how the United States surcharges cotton and woollen cloths, and hardware, and pottery, with fiscal visitations, varying from twenty to seventy or eighty per cent upon real values, whilst we admit her raw cottons customs free to the annual amount alone of nearly six millions of pounds sterling; Russian hemp and tallow at nominal, and French silks at, by comparison, moderate duties; but we are not so arrogant or so unjust as to make Prussia answerable for their mistaken policy; we are the first to admit that these are points having no bearing on the question betwixt England and Prussia. Let us, therefore, hear no more of a spe

cies of deduction not having even the semblance of plausibility about it. But there are pleas upon which issue may be joined; manufactures or productions common to both, or indigenous to one, and objects of consumption in the other country. This is fair, neutral, and debateable ground, and here we may try the cause. There are difficulties in the way, because the Prussian tariff pretends to proceed upon an ad valorem fixation, but is in practice reduced to a poundage, upon some ill explained arbitrary reduction of pounds sterling values into pounds or hundred weights of taxable material. Ours is the manly tariff, in its main features, of real ad valorem duty, and the revenue officer plays the merchant fair, by taking possession of his goods, and paying him for them with a bonus of ten per cent thereupon, should there be fair grounds for suspicion that the invoice is understated for the purpose of evading the tax. We recommend this upright method to Prussia, as better suited to benefit her poorer population, than the poundage plan, which seems solely devised to accommodate the rich and noble classes at their expense. Our tariff may contain, as our foreign friend first named (whom in future we shall distinguish as the Memorialist, from his Memoir) states, more than a thousand different stipulations, whilst that of Prussia has but two hundred; the superior extent and variety of our traffic

The price of corn here at

will account for much, although we are free to say there are still too many. But conceding this, we are not left in the dark, as too often in that of Prussia, and exposed to rates adjudged upon prices long forgotten in the market. We have no prohibitions of import; the word FREE not unfrequently occurs in our table of duties; in the vocabulary of that of Prussia never, excepting on ox blood, manure, or any article or substance under the weight of two ounces. Nominally, indeed, the exportation of certain machines, or parts of machines, is forbiddenreally, there is reason to believe the law is acted on as if a dead letter; * the two or three other absolute or qualified prohibitions outwards are too trivial to mention, and appear to be prejudicial only to ourselves, and, at all events, cannot be so to Prussia.

To establish the fair points of contact between rival systems, we shall take the standard products of Prussia on the one hand, to contrast with those of England on the other, as they exchange, or are suited to exchange, with each other. The cases selected are the strongholds of the former, and her eternal theme of declamation-corn and timber; and on our side, salt, cottons, and woollens. Now it must be borne in mind, that with the aid of our colonies we grow, or can grow, corn and timber sufficient for our own consumption. Assuming, with Mr Becher

448. 8d.

5s.

428.

39s. 8d.

vereely, until at seventy-three shillings it is nearly nominal, or little more than one and a half per cent.

So we deal with corn; let us examine how Prussia retaliates with our salt, of which she imports con