and dams of a perverted ingenuity, and to admit
in unrestricted plenitude to every channel of her verdant meadows the
limpid and fertilizing stream of trade.

"Verily she has had her reward! Search the records of history, and you
will seek in vain for a prosperity so immense, so continuous, so
progressive, as that which has blessed this country in the last
half-century of her annals. This access of wealth was admitted indeed
by the speaker who preceded me. But he complained that we had taken no
account of the changes which the new system was introducing into the
character and occupations of the people. It is true; and he would be a
rash man who should venture to forecast and to determine the remoter
results of such a policy; or should shrink from the consequences of
liberty on the ground that he cannot anticipate their character. Which
of us would have the courage, even if he had the power, to impose upon
a nation for all time the form of its economic life, the type of its
character, the direction of its enterprise? The possibilities that lie
in the womb of Nature are greater than we can gauge; we can but
facilitate their birth, we may not prescribe their anatomy. The evils
of the day call for the remedies of the day; but none can anticipate
with advantage the necessities of the future. And meantime what cause
is there for misgiving? I confess that I see none. The policy of
freedom has been justified, I contend, by its results. And so
confident am I of this, that the time, I believe, is not far distant,
when other countries will awake at last to their own true interests and
emulate, not more to their advantage than to ours, our fiscal
legislation. I see the time approaching when the nations of the world,
laying aside their political animosities, will be knitted together in
the peaceful rivalry of trade; when those barriers of nationality which
belong to the infancy of the race will melt and dissolve in the
sunshine of science and art; when the roar of the cannon will yield to
the softer murmur of the loom, and the apron of the artisan, the blouse
of the peasant be more honourable than the scarlet of the soldier; when
the cosmopolitan armies of trade will replace the militia of death;
when that which God has joined together will no longer be sundered by
the ignorance, the folly, the wickedness of man; when the labour and
the invention of one will become the heritage of all; and the peoples
of the earth meet n