sight of the
Pelion upon Ossa, accumulated masses of pig upon bar iron, immovable as
the cloud-capped Waen and Dowlais of Merthyr Tydvil themselves, should
almost generate burning fever, intense enough, among the unfortunate
though too sanguine producers, to smelt all the ironstone in the bowels
of South Wales, without the aid of furnace or hot blast. Broad cloths,
though encumbering cloth halls, are ceasing all over the earth--so say,
at least, the Leeds anti-corn-law sages. Loads of linens, as Marshall
proclaims, are sinking his mammoth mills; not to lengthen the lamentable
list with the sorrows of silks, of cutlery, crockery, and all other
commodities, the created or impelled of the mighty steam power that by
turns prospers and prostrates us. As the crowning point, the monster
grievance of all, comes the cramming over-production of food,
farinaceous and animal, under which the overfed stomach of the country
is afflicted with nightmare, as we learn on the unimpeachable authority
of that wisest and most infallible of all one-idea'd nostrummongers, the
immortal Cobden himself.[I]

Vast and overwhelming, however, as the ills which follow in the train of
over producing power, in the world material and manufacturing, they sink
into utter insignificance--for magnitude, they are as Highgate Hill to
sky-enveloped Chimborazo of eternal snow--in comparison with that
crowding crush, that prodigious overflow, of charlatanic genius, in the
world physical and spiritual, which blocks up every highway and byway,
swarms in every circle, roars in every market-place, or thunders in each
senate of the realm. There is not one ill which flesh is heir to, which
this race original cannot kill or cure. Whilst bleeding the patient to
death, Sangrado like, and sacking the fees, they will greet him right
courteously with _Viva V. milanos_--live a thousand years, and not one
less of the allotted number. Whilst drenching the body politic with
Reform purge, or, with slashing tomahawk, inflicting Repeal gashes, they
bid the prostrate and panting state subject rejoice over the wondrous
dispatch with which its parts can be dismembered, the arithmetical
accuracy with which its financial plethora can be depleted. Eccentric in
its motions and universal in its aspirations, for the genius of this age
no conception is too mean, no subject too intricate, no enterprise too
rash, no object too sacred. It will condescend with equal readiness upon
torturing a pa