The registered tonnage of the 13,927 British vessels above fifty tons burden, stood, on the 31st of December 1841, (the returns for 1840 or 1839, we do not chance to have,)

         &nb
sp;                                                Tons. 
  At 2,578,862
  Of which foreign trade, in the export of products
    and manufactures to the value of thirty-five
    millions sterling, absorbed 1,258,000

Colonial trade in the transport of sixteen
millions only of values, 1,113,000

Considering the greater mass of values transported,
the foreign trade should have employed, to have
kept its relative shipping proportion and
importance with colonial trade, above 2,400,000

We are, however, entirely satisfied, and it would admit of easy proof, were time and space equally at our disposal for the elaborate development of details, not only that the colonial trade gives occupation to an equal, but to a larger proportion of registered British shipping than the foreign trade.  But we have been obliged to limit ourselves to the consideration of such facts as are most readily accessible, so as to enable the general reader to test at once the approximative fidelity of the vindication we present, and the falsehood, scarcely glozed over with a coating of plausibility, of the vague generalities strung together as a case against the colonies by Mr Cobden and the anti-colonial faction.  We have, moreover, to request the reader to observe, that we have proceeded all along on the basis of the wild assumptions of Mr Cobden’s own self created and unexplained calculations; that by his own figures we have tried and convicted his own conclusions of monstrous exaggeration, and ignorant, if not wilful, deception.  The three fourths charge of army expenditure upon the colonies, is a mere mischievous fabrication of his own brain.  In ordinary circumstances the colonial charge would not enter for more than half that amount; and even with the extraordinary expenditure rendered necessary by Gosford and Durham misrule in Canada, the colonial charge is not equal to the amount so wantonly asserted.  We have likewise not insisted with sufficient force, and at suitable length of evidence, upon the fact of the infinitely greater values proportionally left in the country, in the shape of the wages of labour, and the profits upon capital, by colonial than by foreign trade.  It would not, however, be too much to assume, and indeed the proposition is almost self-evident, that whereas about 150 per cent may be taken as the average improved value of the products absorbed by the foreign trade, over and above the first cost of the raw material from which fabricated, where such material is of foreign origin, the similarly improved excess of values absorbed by the colonial trade, would not average less than from 250 to 300 per cent.  Other occasions may arise, hereafter, more convenient than the present, for throwing these truths into broader relief; we are content, indeed, now to leave Mr Cobden to chew the cud of reflection upon his own colonial blunders and misrepresentations.