unexceptionable authority.

"Within the last year, France has passed an ordinance, doubling the duty
on linen yarns--a measure hostile enough, had it been uniform in its
application to all countries; but, lest there should be any ambiguity
about its meaning, she has actually left open her Belgian frontier to that
article at the former duty, on the condition that Belgium should levy the
high French duty in her custom-houses, so as to prevent the transit of the
British yarns through that country. To this disreputable and humiliating
proposal, Belgium has consented. Again, amidst the loudest professions
from the Prussian government, of an anxiety to advance the relaxation of
commercial restrictions, that government has, nevertheless, adopted a
proceeding not less hostile or mischievous than the measure of France with
regard to linen yarns. The Congress of the Deputies of the Zollverein, at
Stuttgard, have in a new tariff, which was to take effect on the 1st of
January, besides some minor alterations of an unfavourable kind, decreed,
upon the proposal of Prussia, that goods mixed of cotton and wool, if of
more than one colour, shall pay fifty thalers the centner, instead of
thirty; that is, instead of a very high, shall be liable to an exorbitant,
and, as it may prove, a prohibitory duty. Next, America, as all our
readers must be aware, has, after a struggle, passed a tariff, subverting
altogether the arrangement established by the Compromise Act of 1833, and
imposing upon the various descriptions of manufactured goods rates of duty
varying from thirty to forty and fifty per cent and upwards, which have
had the effect of stopping a great portion of the shipments of cotton
goods to that country from Great Britain during the past autumn, and,
without doubt, have added greatly to the distresses of our manufacturing
population. Besides these greater instances, Russia, according to her wont
in such matters, and Spain, have published, within the test fifteen months,
new tariffs, of which it is difficult to say whether they are still worse
than, or only as execrably bad, as those which they succeeded, but, in the
close rivalry between the old and the new, the latter seem, upon the whole,
entitled to the palm of prohibitive rigour. And Portugal, likewise, has
augmented the duties payable upon certain classes of her imports, by a
measure of the recent date of March 1841, and by another of last year. In
the mean time, Spain has conclu