permitting them the use of their own manufactures, and compelling them to go naked, or to clothe themselves like the aborigines of the country in the skins of animals.  There is but one remedy for the disease of the colony:  it is to give due encouragement to agriculture, and to promote the growth of exportable commodities, which its inhabitants may offer in exchange for the productions of other countries.  The manufacturing system which has begun to take root, will then wither away of its own accord; since it will then be the least productive manner in which capital and labour can be employed.

Happy would it have been for the colonists, if these repeated efforts, these distressing and embarrassing expedients to supply their wants, had been the only injurious consequences resulting from the stagnation of agriculture.  The day when their wretched situation shall have at length awakened the commiseration of the parent country, would then have witnessed the term and bounds of their sufferings.  Alas! far different will be the case.  Like a ruined merchant, who would defer, to the utmost length, the disgrace of bankruptcy, in the daily hope of some prosperous adventure to retrieve his fortune and restore his credit, the settlers have gone on contracting debts, which have accumulated with the increasing embarrassments of the community.  The engagements of the majority of the cultivators, thus swelled in a few years to a bulk, which they had no longer any chance of reducing:  pressed on all sides by their creditors, the mortgage or sale of their farms became inevitable; and even these sacrifices have, in general, been far from cancelling their bonds; so that they not only have ceased to be proprietors, but also still continue debtors to a large amount.  Their creditors, in many instances, a set of rapacious, unprincipled dealers, availing themselves of the power which the law would give them over the personal liberty of these, their debtors, immediately took that advantage of their own commanding position, which might have been expected from their characters.  They engaged, or more properly speaking, constrained, these poor wretches to cultivate as tenants, the same soil which lately belonged to them, and exacted from them in return, a rent too exorbitant to be paid.  Every succeeding year, therefore, has but tended to increase their obligations, and they are, at present, identified with the soil, and reduced to all intents and purposes, except in name, to as complete a state of vassalage as the serfs of Russia.  If they should be in need of any trifling supply, it is to their proprietors, and to them only, that they dare have recourse, though they would be able to obtain the same articles a hundred per cent. cheaper elsewhere.  To their granaries the whole produce of their industry is conveyed:  and, in spite of all their toil and privation, far from discharging their original debts, they find themselves every day more deeply involved.  The more they struggle, the more complicated