hich was composed of
nominees of the crown, selected exclusively from the merchant class,
could throw out all their measures, and were irresponsible to the
people.

In England King George IV. had rendered only one service to the
people,--he had brought royalty into contempt, and so strengthened the
feeling which resulted in the passage of many necessary measures which
his father and brothers had opposed. But the selfish interests of the
merchants and land-owners of England were still in the way of many
reforms. Benjamin Disraeli, who did his worst to prevent the starving
people from having cheap bread, became the flunkey and afterward the
master of the Tory squires; and it was not until thousands had died of
famine in Ireland that the selfish land-owners agreed to that
reduction of duty on grain which made free trade so popular in
England.

Now, by a wise colonization policy, the government might have helped
both Ireland and Newfoundland.

By passing a law to the effect that, so long as the French gave a
bounty on the export of salt fish, the English government would give
their own fishermen exactly the same amount of protection, the French
would soon have been brought to terms; and, by opening up Newfoundland
to settlement by roads and railways, many of the starving Irish would
have been provided with homes under the British flag far more
comfortable than any that they could find in their native land. So a
more prosperous Ireland would have risen on this side of the Atlantic,
and England would have gained thereby. The Irish and the Catholic were
really quite as loyal to the empire as any others. The difference was
that the English High Churchman and the Scotch Presbyterian got all
the privileges; and the Irishman and the Catholic were taught by the
action of the British government that insurrection was their only hope
of getting simple justice.

India, China, Newfoundland, Ireland, were simply sweaters' dens for
the profit of England and Scotland.

Just as in Newfoundland the British merchant insisted on keeping out
every trace of free trade that would enable the poor fisherman to sell
his fish in the highest market and buy his provisions in the lowest,
so in China the British in 1838 insisted on forcing the Chinaman to
buy the poisonous opium of India, although in 1834 the China
government had warned the British of their intention to prohibit the
infamous traffic. The war that England thereupon proclaimed again