the Neva. Absolute of wisdom, however, as they arrogate to be,
and casehardened as they are, against assaulting results which should
destroy their self-willed principle--a principle, like the laws of the
Medes and Persians, proclaimed to be unchanged and unchangeable--in face
of which facts are powerless and adverse experience contumeliously
scouted, or mendaciously perverted, it is sufficiently obvious that
lessons in political economy will, less than from any quarter of the
globe, perhaps, be accepted from St Petersburg--they will fall upon
unwilling ears--upon understandings obtuse or perverted.

We are not of the number of those who would contend that, under all
times or circumstances, should a principle, or rather the system built
upon a principle, be rigorously upheld in its application intact, sacred
equally from modification on the one hand, as against radical revolution
on the other. It cannot be denied that, under the protective system,
have grown into their present gigantic proportions all the great
manufacturing interests of Great Britain. But, with customary hardihood
of assertion, maintain the economists--in whose wake follow the
harder-mouthed, coarser-minded Cobdens of the League--although
manufactures have flourished under such a system to an extent which has
constituted this country the workshop of the world, they have so
flourished in spite of the system; and, in its absence, left exposed to
free unrestricted competition from abroad, must inevitably have
progressed at a more gigantic rate of speed still. This is asserted to
be in the order of nature, but as nature is every where the same--as the
same broad features and first elements characterize all countries more
or less alike--we ask for examples, for one example only, of the
successful establishment and progress of any one unprotected industry.
The demand is surely limited, and reasonable enough. The mendacious
League, with the Brights and Cobdens of rude and riotous oratory, are
daily trumpeting it in the towns, and splitting the ears of rural
groundlings with the reiterated assertion that, of all others, the
cotton manufacture owes nothing to protection. What!--nothing? Were
general restrictive imposts on foreign manufactures no protection? Was
the virtually prohibited importation of the cotton fabrics of India no
boon? of India, root and branch sacrificed for the advancement of
Manchester? Why, there are people yet alive who can recollect the d