that every individual might feel and understand why he loved his country, and took a personal interest in its welfare.  How would England, for example, depend on the caprices of foreign rulers if she contained within herself all the necessaries, and despised whatever they possessed of the luxuries, of life?  How could they starve her into compliance with their views?  Of what consequence would it be that they refused to take her woollen manufactures, when large and fertile tracts of the island ceased to be allotted to the waste of pasturage?  On a natural system of diet we should require no spices from India; no wines from Portugal, Spain, France, or Madeira; none of those multitudinous articles of luxury, for which every corner of the globe is rifled, and which are the causes of so much individual rivalship, such calamitous and sanguinary national disputes.  In the history of modern times, the avarice of commercial monopoly, no less than the ambition of weak and wicked chiefs, seems to have fomented the universal discord, to have added stubbornness to the mistakes of cabinets, and indocility to the infatuation of the people.  Let it ever be remembered that it is the direct influence of commerce to make the interval between the richest and the poorest man wider and more unconquerable.  Let it be remembered that it is a foe to everything of real worth and excellence in the human character.  The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarce capable of cure.  Is it impossible to realize a state of society, where all the energies of man shall be directed to the production of his solid happiness?  Certainly, if this advantage (the object of all political speculation) be in any degree attainable, it is attainable only by a community which holds out no factitious incentives to the avarice and ambition of the few, and which is internally organized for the liberty, security, and comfort of the many.  None must be entrusted with power (and money is the completest species of power) who do not stand pledged to use it exclusively for the general benefit.  But the use of animal flesh and fermented liquors directly militates with this equality of the rights of man.  The peasant cannot gratify these fashionable cravings without leaving his family to starve.  Without disease and war, those sweeping curtailers of population, pasturage would include a waste too great to be afforded.  The labour requisite to support a family is far lighter’ than is usually supposed. (It has come under the author’s experience that some of the workmen on an embankment in North Wales, who, in consequence of the inability of the proprietor to pay them, seldom received their wages, have supported large families by cultivating small spots of sterile ground by moonlight.  In the notes to Pratt’s poem, “Bread, or the Poor”, is an account of an industrious labourer who, by working in a small garden, before and after his day’s task, attained to an enviable state of independence.) The peasantry work, not only for themselves, but for the aristocracy, the army, and the manufacturers.