raised for the same purposes since the war.[49] I know that in the last four years of peace, when they rose regularly and rapidly, the sums specified in the acts were not near one third of the subsequent amount.  In the last session of Parliament, the Grand Junction Company, as it is called, having sunk half a million, (of which I feel the good effects at my own door,) applied to your House for permission to subscribe half as much more among themselves.  This Grand Junction is an inosculation of the Grand Trunk; and in the present session, the latter company has obtained the authority of Parliament to float two hundred acres of land, for the purpose of forming a reservoir, thirty feet deep, two hundred yards wide at the head, and two miles in length:  a lake which may almost vie with that which once fed the now obliterated canal of Languedoc.

The present war is, above all others of which we have heard or read, a war against landed property.  That description of property is in its nature the firm base of every stable government,—­and has been so considered by all the wisest writers of the old philosophy, from the time of the Stagyrite, who observes that the agricultural class of all others is the least inclined to sedition.  We find it to have been so regarded in the practical politics of antiquity, where they are brought more directly homo to our understandings and bosoms in the history of Borne, and above all, in the writings of Cicero.  The country tribes were always thought more respectable than those of the city.  And if in our own history there is any one circumstance to which, under God, are to be attributed the steady resistance, the fortunate issue, and sober settlement of all our struggles for liberty, it is, that, while the landed interest, instead of forming a separate body, as in other countries, has at all times been in close connection and union with the other great interests of the country, it has been spontaneously allowed to lead and direct and moderate all the rest.  I cannot, therefore, but see with singular gratification, that, during a war which has been eminently made for the destruction of the lauded proprietors, as well as of priests and kings, as much has been done by public works for the permanent benefit of their stake in this country as in all the rest of the current century, which now touches to its close.  Perhaps after this it may not be necessary to refer to private observation; but I am satisfied that in general the rents of lands have been considerably increased:  they are increased very considerably, indeed, if I may draw any conclusion from my own little property of that kind.  I am not ignorant, however, where our public burdens are most galling.  But all of this class will consider who they are that are principally menaced,—­how little the men of their description in other countries, where this revolutionary fury has but touched, have been found equal to their own protection,—­how tardy and unprovided and full of anguish is their flight, chained down as they are by every tie to the soil,—­how helpless they are, above all other men, in exile, in poverty, in need, in all the varieties of wretchedness; and then let them well weigh what are the burdens to which they ought not to submit for their own salvation.