men "on whose brows
shame is ashamed to sit"--and, we might add, another Canning, a Follett,
Sir George Lewis, and a hecatomb of Colonial rulers, who have died,
overtasked by toil and responsibility; but in all that time we have
never heard a minister accused of corruption, or building palaces, or
making a fortune from public treasure. Corruption, if so it may still be
termed, has taken another phase; it has bowed its head and courted
democracy, like to the Roman king, Ancus Martius, "nimium gaudens
popularibus auris"--cringing to popular suffrage--to ride into place and
power, by granting measures momentarily floating uppermost, and
suffering the tail to guide the head, as did the snake in AEsop's fable.
We attained the height of grandeur of 1814 under the guidance of the
head, and we are now upon our trial of democratical government, and
whether it be equal to the old. Under such auspices commerce has been
the petted minion of the last thirty years. Not the native forest tree
of Pitt, Huskisson, and Canning, but the hot-bed plant of the advocates
of a predominant trade. No British statesman ever dreamt of restricting
commerce,--which ever was the bond of unity of nations; but we have sunk
every interest at home to swell the exports and imports, to make Britain
what Egypt was in the days of the patriarch--the storehouse of the
world. Egypt and England both put their agriculturists to pain, and the
rural population to serfdom; but they only exchange the stable basis of
well-being for an unstable one, for commerce is proverbially of a
fleeting nature.

The age in which Gay wrote was eminently what we now designate as
conservative. Excise was hateful then; as customs are denounced now, so
home taxation was denounced then. So wonderfully do systems change, that
in the monthly table of the revenue of this period (December, 1870), the
customs do not raise one-third of the revenue, of which the other
two-thirds are raised by home taxation.

From ministers proceed we to the misers. I doubt whether any domestic
changes have wrought so great an amelioration in our well-being as banks
and banking. It has saved us from burglars; it has, by cheques, redeemed
us from the tyranny of tradesmen's books. It has put personal property
on a stronger foundation than it held, and the banker keeps an excellent
private account, gratuitously, of your receipts and expenditure. The
trouble that the possession of gold gave to its possessor before