are almost as much overdone as his invectives against M. Target, a wretched preacher of law, and liberty, and liberality;' who, we are told, had the baseness to decline this honourable, and, to a man of professional feeling, indispensable duty. M. Target, as is well known, declined the arduous task on account of his age and infirmities.' Indeed, the French Bar never, throughout the worst times of the Revolution, showed any backwardness to meet the risks attendant upon a faithful and fearless discharge of their professional duties. In the reign of terror, all the victims of the Revolutionary Tribunal were defended by counsel; and no one is said to have suffered for thus exercising the functions of his calling. Such bodies, indeed, being pretty well resolved on the decision they are to give before the trial, are as little likely to be enraged at the advocates who appear for the accused, as they are to be obstructed in the pursuit of injustice by their exertions. The praise of M. Malesherbes is, in one particular, more than might have been expected from this Editor. Illustrious by his life, and even, if possible, more so by his death, which was as heroic as that of Sir Thomas More,' seems a lavish measure of eulogy for one who, we are afterwards told (p. 284), was a professed infidel.

This writer certainly neither praises nor blames by halves, and not often with a felicity proportioned to his vehemence. His zeal is, indeed, very rarely according to knowledge; and we have seldom, out of a common party paper, seen any one who exposed himself more to exposure and retorts, by his inconsistencies and heedless violence. We must admit, no doubt, that Buonaparte is always to be bitterly reviled, in season and out of season:' but surely he cannot be much charged with having preferred men because of their jacobinism and atheism; yet we find a certain Dupont commemorated, who was a regicide, • and boasted in the tribune that he was an atheist;' wherewithal our judicious Editor must add, these two qualities could not fail to recommend him to Buonaparte, who employed him.' The venerable, gallant, and amiable La Fayette is, in the space of seven lines, called somewhere about ten coarse names; the kind of figure which this author mistakes for eloquence, in common with a set of female rhetoricians who inhabit the left bank of the Thames, near London Bridge, and there keep their academy.

The adepts of this school are found, as we have heard, fully more unpleasant friends than adversaries; and truly, our Editor seems the very character prayed against in the noted Spanish proverb. What, for instance, can be less grateful to the most legitimate Emperor of all the Austrias, than this way of men

tioning Robespierre's project of marrying the French princess! He had the audacity to raise his thoughts to the hand of the young princess.'- A dislike to preserve any trace of this surprising insolence, induced the first editor to omit this pas'sage.' (p. 267.) Yet Robespierre was at the head of the government, and the Duchess was in prison, and utterly helpless; far more so than the Archduchess of Austria was some years after, when such audacity was successful, and such insolence ceased to surprise. Again, we find a piece of composition in p. 213, which will probably be termed rhodomontade in some parts of the British dominions. A search of the captive females had been ordered; and the expression is, les fouiller à discretion. This phrase' (says the Editor) is, thank Heaven! ⚫ untranslateable into our language: None but the monsters of the French age of liberality and reason could have thought a 'fouiller à discretion des femmes. Indeed! Not even in the customhouses which stud the legitimate frontiers of Austria and Prussia? But we may find the thing without the name. Did our Editor ever hear of such places as St Helena? And there may be countries where ten thousand times worse than the thing, name and all, shall be found rank enough; aye, and perpetrated by those before whom this ranting Ultra would fain be permitted, crawling on his belly, to lick the dust. We speak not of the realms which our magnanimous Alexander blesses with the delights of his universal benevolence, including Siberia, the knout and the knife, but only of a nearer and more civilized region, for example, Milan. Talk, indeed, of our language having no name for the act of outrage on female delicacy by barbarous treatment-unmanly insult-indecent pryings-disgusting exposures-hired treachery-suborned falsehood! OUR language- the tongue spoken by the King, by the Lords, and by the Commons of OUR Country! Truly this editor has but two positions to choose between-the height of ignorance or of audacity. Nay, the horror with which he regards all the treatment of Marie-Antoinette, is somewhat unthinking. The tribunal that murdered the Queen, '—' the • vile and ferocious wretches, who did not take the interest in the Queen's fate which all honest men did.' The indignation freely expressed at the more atrocious charges brought against her-had possibly been more prudently spared in our age and nation. At least this may be said for the oppressors of the French Queen, that they openly and fairly avowed their republicanism; they proclaimed, with a loud and manly voice, as well as by their blood-stained hands, an implacable hatred of Royalty; they never whined out the cant of devotion to the

Throne and the Altar, while they were undermining the one by their greedy ambition, and polluting the other by their hypocritical profligacy; they professed to choose their victim because she had worn a crown, and because they were resolved that no one should wear it after her; and they disdained to shed crocodile tears over the voluntary work of their own hands. It has sometimes been said of those men who destroyed the French Queen, that they had every vice but avarice and hypocrisy. This praise, such as it is, belongs to them. They are men who have not in all things found servile imitators.

ART. VI.

Reasons for the Immediate Repeal of the Tax on Foreign Wool. By JAMES BISCHOFF. 3d edition. pp. 47. London, 1820.

UP P to a very recent period, the woollen manufacture was of greater importance and value than any other branch of our national industry; and though now surpassed by that of cotton, it still continues to be one of the principal sources of our wealth and power. In his elaborate and valuable work on Insurance, Sir F. M. Eden estimates the value of the manufactured woollen goods annually consumed in Great Britain, at eleven millions; and if to this we add seven millions, which is about the average value of those exported, the total value of the annual produce of this manufacture will be about EIGHTEEN millions. The value of the raw material has been estimated by Sir Frederick and others, at one-third of the total value of the goods, or at six millions, leaving a sum of twelve millions as the aggregate amount of profits and wages. It is difficult to ascertain the precise proportions in which this sum is divided between capitalists and labourers. We believe, however, that we shall not be far wrong if we suppose the profits of the manufacturers, and the sum necessary to indemnify them for the wear and tear of machinery, and the waste of capital in general, to amount together to 18 per cent. of the 12 millions, or to 2,160,000l., leaving 9,840,000l. as the total amount of wages. There is a considerable discrepancy in the accounts of the rate of wages earned by the workmen. We have, however, been assured, on what we reckon extremely good authority, that 15. may be taken as a fair average of the annual wages obtained by the various descriptions of individuals in this department of industry. Now, if we divide the gross amount of wages, or 9,840,000l. by this sum, we get 546,000 as the total number of workmen. And, considering the comparatively limited extent to which children

are employed, we may, on the most moderate hypothesis, double the number of workmen to get the whole number of persons supported by the wages of labour in the woollen manufacture. Exclusive, therefore, of the master manufacturers, or of those who live on the profits of stock, it is plain that no fewer than 1,100,000 or one-thirteenth part of the inhabitants of Britain are supported by the woollen manufacture-a manufacture, it must be recollected, of which more than one-third of the produce is regularly exported to other countries.

Most of the witnesses examined at the Bar of the Houses of Lords and Commons in 1800, on the question of allowing the free exportation of wool to Ireland, concur in representing the value of the woollens annually manufactured, and the number of persons employed, as considerably greater than we have now stated. But the numbers we have now given, though greatly within the mark, are more than sufficient to demonstrate the paramount importance of this manufacture, and the extreme impolicy of any measure having a tendency to endanger so fruitful a source of employment and of wealth.

Instead, however, of continuing that protection and favour to this manufacture which it had enjoyed for centuries, and instead of attempting to relieve it from the various trammels and restrictions which the friendly but mistaken zeal of a less enlightened age had imposed, the late Chancellor of the Exchequer proposed in 1819, that the duty of about d. per lib. (7s. 11d. per cwt.) on all foreign wool imported, should be increased to 6d. per lib.! The history of this increase of duty is not a little curious and instructive. The augmentation of the revenue was its apparent object; but its real object was to check the importation of foreign wool; and thus, by increasing the demand for, and consequently the price of British wool, to operate as a boon to the agriculturists, who had become excessively clamorous about the competition of the foreign wool growers. It has been very generally estimated, that the quantity of wool annually raised in Great Britain, amounts to about 144 millions of pounds; but this is probably exaggerated; and taking it only at 100 millions, if the increased duty on foreign wool had added, as the agriculturists confidently anticipated, 5d. per lib. to the price of British wool, it would have transferred a sum of no less than 2,083,000l. Sterling a year to their pockets, from the pockets of the domestic and foreign consumers of our woollen manufactures. The prospect of realizing so large a sum,--for it is impossible they could have had any other inducement,-made the agriculturists press ministers to impose the duty in question. Nor is it any longer a secret that

its imposition actually formed the stipulated price paid by Mr Vansittart, for the unnatural support given by the landed interest in Parliament, to the precious scheme introduced by him in 1819, for raising three millions of new taxes! Among other items, these taxes embraced an additional duty on malt; and it deserves to be remarked, as indicative of the spirit of the parties, that only a very short period was suffered to elapse after the agriculturists had succeeded in getting the tax laid on wool, before they turned round on the minister, and forced him to reduce the malt duty. And while they have ever since successfully resisted every attempt to procure a repeal of the wool tax, they have obtained the repeal of the agricultural horse tax, and of the additional leather tax, just because they fancied they pressed with peculiar severity on themselves! Such is a true account of the wool tax. But its supporters in Parliament were too cautious to state the motives by which they were actuated. They contended that the proposed duty was no more than a fair compensation to the agriculturists for the loss they sustained by the restriction on the exportation of British wool; and they farther contended, that it was quite visionary to suppose that our superiority in that manufacture could be in the least degree endangered by so small a tax. For the reasons already stated, these arguments appeared satisfactory to a large majority in both Houses of Parliament. The duty was in consequence imposed; and the official accounts we shall immediately lay before our readers, show that the foreign woollen trade has since gradually and progressively declined!

It was easy, indeed, to foresee this decline from the beginning. We are far from possessing the same decided ascendancy in the woollen manufacture, that we possess in the cotton and hardware manufactures. It is an undoubted fact, that the French, Prussians, and Saxons, manufacture fine cloths of a superior quality to any that are manufactured in England. Mr Jacob, who will not certainly be suspected of being an alarmist, or of representing the improvements made by foreigners in a too favourable point of view, has given some information with respect to the Prussian woollen manufacture, in his account of his Travels in Germany, published in 1820, which bears directly on the present question, and is of very great importance.

The increase of Merino sheep,' says Mr Jacob, has given, and still continues to give, a great stimulus to the fine woollen manufactures, especially to those in the newly acquired provinces bordering on France, where some of the best fine woollens that Europe can exhibit are made. In the department of the Roer, or as it is now called, of Aachen, just within the boundary line that separates