reign corn, to the extent of the deficiency of domestic product, as to save the industrious poor from frequent recurrence of distress. When landholders, satisfied with the large share of the public income which circumstances assign to them, renounce the impracticable project of advancing their own interest by the distress of the lower orders, and pursue it by the more natural and effectual means of promoting the improvement of the country, the alarm which has lately prevailed will be quieted, harmony restored, and by the concurrence of all classes in the peaceful pursuit of their respective employments, it may be hoped that the public prosperity may be preserved and still farther advanced, commerce and manufacture be still farther extended; and as this country, and those with which it has intercourse, increase in wealth, the rent of land and the comfort of those who cultivate it will increase in the same proportion. BRIEF OBSERVATIONS, &c. THE HE sentence recently pronounced on a distinguished naval officer, the public feeling with which it was followed, and the ultimate remission of its severest penalty, naturally lead to the discussion of the punishment itself, which so powerfully aroused the pity and the indignation of the public. It is by occurrences like this; by extreme cases which call into exercise the dormant feelings, that those investigations are excited which terminate in the reform of the most ancient and deep-rooted abuses. Evils which the barbarism of remote ages, or the pressure of immediate danger, has thrust into the system of government, and which have long in silence obstructed the progress of society, are regarded as necessary and proper, or wholly overlooked, merely, because they form a part of that order of things, which we have always been accustomed to admire. We admit all that power to be legitimate which we have always seen administered with mildness. have acquiesced in the propriety of those inflictions which We never disturbed the circle in which we move. We overlook the causes which are secretly moulding the character of the state, while they do not interfere with our enjoyments, and while they affect those alone, whose fate excites but little of our sympathy. But when power perverts its energy, and when its enactments, which merely oppressed the lowlier ranks of men, press rudely on those in whose fate we cannot but feel deeply concerned; we suddenly perceive the mischief in its deepest foundations, and shake them by the awful voice of peaceful and enlightened discussion. Thus evil is finally subversive of itself; its most dreadful examples facilitate its overthrow; its excesses destroy the principle from which they arise. Thus the arbitrary extortions of Charles might have furnished a woeful precedent for our future kings, had not the levy of ship-money called into action the spirit of Hampden. The wanton cruelty of the tyrant of Switzerland awoke "the might that slumbered in a peasant's arm," to break the chains of its generous and noble mountaineers. By the illegal proceedings against Wilkes, general warrants have been abolished for ever. And the efforts of a late minister to atone for the reforming zeal of his youth, by dragging those men to a scaffold whom he had first seduced into remonstrance, made way for the immortal integrity and eloquence of Erskine, and gave a death blow to the sanguinary doctrine of constructive treason. Encouraged by such examples, with which history is abundantly prolific, we hope to make some practical improvement of the sentence pronounced on Lord Cochrane, by directing the attention of our countrymen to the species of infliction at the instance of which they so generously revolted. We shall, in pursuit of this object, lay before them a few simple observations, n the principle upon |