erest which is in natural opposition to
it."--(_Mill, Polit. Econ._) In whatever point of view, therefore, we
regard this subject--whether as one of duty by providing the means of
healthy and legitimate employment to our numerous artificers and
labourers now in a state of destitution--a domestic calamity likely to
be often inflicted upon us--unless new fields, easy of access, are made
permanently open to our continually increasing population--and "it would
be difficult to show that it is not as much the duty of rulers to
provide, as far as they can, for the removal of a domestic calamity, as
it is to guard the people entrusted to their care from foreign
outrage"--will they "slumber till some great emergency, some dreadful
economic or other crisis, reveals the capacities of evil which the
volcanic depths of our society may now hide under but a deep crust?"--or
whether we view it as a means of assisting any general system in the
penal code--or whether we view it as a point of individual or government
interest, by turning all that extra-productive power, now idle, in the
direction of our own colonies, and thus connecting and attaching them
more strongly to the mother country--increasing their wealth, their
power and our own:--or whether we consider it in a moral and religious
point of view, as affording greater and quicker facilities for the
spread of education and the Gospel of Christ[see Note 58]--or whether we
look upon it as an instrument for the increase of commerce, and (as an
important consequence) the necessarily directing men's minds, with the
bright beams of hope from their own individual and immediate distress,
as well as from the general excitement and democratic feeling and spirit
of contention showing itself amongst many nations (an object greatly to
be desired) for--

"The times are wild....
....Every minute now
_May_ be the father of some stratagem;"

--or whether we look at it in a political point of view, as keeping
open to us at all times, without the necessity of interference with
other nations or of war, a great high road to most of our colonial
possessions, and particularly to India--viewing it then in any one of
these points, who can doubt for a moment the beneficial results that
must attend such an undertaking. But when all these considerations are
taken together, we must repeat what we said in a former page, that it
is a grand and a noble undertaking, and that it must be accomp