To what ultimate extent it may be wise or practicable to push inclosures of common and waste lands may be a question of doubt, in some points of view:  but no person thinks them already carried to excess; and the relative magnitude of the sums laid out upon them gives us a standard of estimating the comparative situation of the landed interest.  Your House, this session, appointed a committee on waste lands, and they have made a report by their chairman, an honorable baronet, for whom the minister the other day (with very good intentions, I believe, but with little real profit to the public) thought fit to erect a board of agriculture.  The account, as it stands there, appears sufficiently favorable.  The greatest number of inclosing bills passed in any one year of the last peace does not equal the smallest annual number in the war, and those of the last year exceed by more than one half the highest year of peace.  But what was my surprise, on looking into the late report of the Secret Committee of the Lords, to find a list of these bills during the war, differing in every year, and[48] larger on the whole by nearly one third!  I have checked this account by the statute-book, and find it to be correct.  What new brilliancy, then, does it throw over the prospect, bright as it was before!  The number during the last four years has more than doubled that of the four years immediately preceding; it has surpassed the five years of peace, beyond which the Lords’ committees have not gone; it has even surpassed (I have verified the fact) the whole ten years of peace.  I cannot stop here.  I cannot advance a single step in this inquiry without being obliged to cast my eyes back to the period when I first knew the country.  These bills, which had begun in the reign of Queen Anne, had passed every year in greater or less numbers from the year 1723; yet in all that space of time they had not reached the amount of any two years during the present war; and though soon after that time they rapidly increased, still at the accession of his present Majesty they were far short of the number passed in the four years of hostilities.

In my first letter I mentioned the state of our inland navigation, neglected as it had been from the reign of King William to the time of my observation.  It was not till the present reign that the Duke of Bridgewater’s canal first excited a spirit of speculation and adventure in this way.  This spirit showed itself, but necessarily made no great progress, in the American war.  When peace was restored, it began of course to work with more sensible effect; yet in ten years from that event the bills passed on that subject were not so many as from the year 1793 to the present session of Parliament.  From what I can trace on the statute-book, I am confident that all the capital expended in these projects during the peace bore no degree of proportion (I doubt, on very grave consideration, whether all that was ever so expended was equal) to the money which has been