Knowledge is Power:

ent man: the Dukes of Buckingham and Bridgewater-Making good for trade-Unprofitable consumption-War aga

of society,-and is still denied by existing prejudices, derived from the current maxims of former days of ignorance and half-knowledge. With the speculative writers we have little to do. When Rousseau, for instance, advises governments not to secure property to its possessors, but to deprive them of all means of accumulating, it is sufficient to know that the same writer advocated the savage state, in which there should be no property, in preference to the social, which is founded on appropriation. Knowing this, and being convinced that the savage state, even with imperfect appropriation, is one of extre

in these excesses, and dies an outcast and a beggar, he is said to have been a hearty fellow, and to have "made good for trade." When, on the contrary, a man of fortune economizes his revenue-lives like a virtuous and reasonable being, whose first duty is the cultivation of his understanding-eats and drinks with regard to his health-keeps no more retainers than are sufficient for his proper comfort and decency-breaks and destroys nothing-has respect to the inferior animals, as well from motives of prudence as of mercy-and dies without a mortgage on his lands; he is said to have been a stingy fellow who did not know how to "circulate his money." To "circulate money," to "make

's worst room, wi

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his health, of

lord of useless

enditure to 400l. a-year, and devoted all the remaining portion of his revenues to the construction of a magnificent work of the highest public utility. The one supported a train of cooks and valets and horse-jockeys: the other called into action the labour of thousands, and employed in the direction of that labour the skill of Brindley, one of

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has less to lay out, some other person has less to lay out. The glass-maker, probably, makes more glass at the moment; but he does so to exchange with the capital that would otherwise have gone to the maker of clothes or of furniture: and, there being an absolute destruction of the funds for the maintenance of labour, by an unnecessary destruction of what former labour has produced, trade generally is injured to the extent of the destruction. Some now say that a fire makes good for trade. The only difference of evil between the fire which destroys a house, and the mob which breaks the windows, is, that the fire absorbs capital for the maintenance of trade, or labour, in the proportion of a hundred to one when compared with the mob. Some say that war makes good for trade. The only difference of pecuniary evil (the moral evils admit of no comparison) between the fire and the war is, that the war abso

value riches

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g a visit from the O'Neiles of Ireland, ostentatiously burnt down his house at Inverary upon their departure; and an Earl of Athol pursued the same course in 1528, after having entertained the papal legate, upon the pretence that it was "the constant habitude of the high-landers to set on fire in the morning the place which had lodged them the night before." When the feudal lords had so little respect for their own property, it was not likely that they would have much regard for the accumulation of others. The Jews, who were the great capitalists of the middle ages, and who really merit the gratitude of Europeans for their avarice, as that almost a

al suffering lay beneath the surface of the merriment. Herrick, one of our charming old lyric poe

swains and

see the hock

cart hear

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cart, some ki

hem up with

fill-horse, s

oke the home

an aching heart in the village hovels, for there was no store to equalize prices, and no communication to make the abundance of one district-much less of one country-mi

Hock

ames I. we find, from a speech of the great Lord Bacon, that it was a pretty constant practice of the king's purveyors to extort large sums of money by threatening to cut down favourite trees which grew near a mansion-house or in avenues. Despotism, in all ages, has depopulated the finest countries, by rendering capital insecure, and therefore unproductive; insomuch that Montesquieu lays it down as a maxim, that lands are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility, but in proportion to their freedom. In the fifteenth century, in England, we find sums of money voted for the restoration of decayed towns and villages. Just laws would have restored them much more quickly and effectually. The state of agriculture was so low that the most absurd enactments were made to compel farmers to till and sow their own lands, and calling upon every man to plant at least forty beans. All the laws for the regulation of labourers, at the same period, assumed that t

an injury. Instead of encouraging the intercourse between one trade and another, they encircled every trade with the most absurd monopolies and exclusive privileges. Instead of rendering commerce free between one district and another, they, even in the same country, encompassed commerce with the most harassing restrictions, which separated county from county, and town from town, as if seas ran between them. If a man of Coventry came to London with his wares, he was encountered at every step with the privileges of companies; if the man of London sought to trade at Coventry, he was obstructed by the same corporate rights, preventing either the Londoner or the Coventry man trading with advan

man in ten must have been, to use the words of the same historian, "devoured and eaten up by the gallows." In the same reign the first statute against Egyptians (gipsies) was passed. These people went from place to place in great companies-spoke a cant language, which Harrison calls Pedler's French-and were subdivided into fifty-two different classes of thieves. The same race of people prevailed throughout Europe. Cervantes, the author of 'Don Quixote,' says of the Egyptians or Bohemians, that they seem to have been born for no other purpose than that of pillaging. While this universal plunder went forward, it is evident that the insecurity of property must have been so great that there could have been little accu

ffhead'

o the Chronicl

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