t was acting. It could not,
therefore, be reasonably expected that the grievances of any one
colony should become the subject of minute and particular
investigation; and still less could it be imagined that the
government should convert their attention to the relief of one,
which has comparatively excited but a small share of public
interest, and has hitherto been considered more in the light of a
prison, than of what he has endeavoured to prove it might be
rendered,--one of the most useful and valuable appendages of the
empire. This apology, however, for the neglect which the colony
has experienced during the war, cannot be pleaded in vindication
of a perseverance in the same impolitic and oppressive course in
time of peace. Nor is it to be wondered at, as upwards of three
years have now elapsed since the consolidation of the
tranquillity of the world, that the colonists should begin to
feel indignant at the continuance of disabilities, for the
abrogation of which the most powerful considerations of justice
and expediency have been urged in vain. To remove such just
grounds for dissatisfaction and complaint, and to allow them, at
length, the enjoyment of those rights and privileges, of which
they ought never to have been debarred, would, at best, be but a
poor compensation for an impeded agriculture and languishing
commerce; but it is the only one that can now be offered; and,
although it cannot repair the wide ravages which so many years of
unmerited and absurd restrictions have occasioned, it may arrest
the progress of desolation, and prevent any further increase to
the numbers who have already sunk beneath the pressure of an
overwhelming system. It is, therefore, to be hoped that the cause
of humanity will no longer be outraged by unnecessary delay, and
that the only atonement, which can be made the colonists for
their past and present sufferings, will no longer be
withheld.

The author is fully aware that, in the course of this work, he
has developed no new principle of political economy, and that he
has only travelled in the broad beaten path in which hundreds
have journeyed before him. For troubling, therefore, the public
with a repetition of principles, of which the truth is so
generally known and acknowledged, the only plea he can urge in
his justification is a hope that the reiteration of them will not
be deemed unnecessary and obtrusive, so long as their application
is incomplete; so long as vice and mise