tion as with the rising of water against a dam-head
stretched across a river. Days and weeks may pass, especially if
droughts have been protracted and the stream low, during which the
rising of the water proves to be a slow, silent, inefficient sort
of process, of half-inches and eighth-parts; but when the river gets
into flood,--when the vast accumulation begins to topple over the
dam-dyke,--when the dyke itself begins to swell, and bulge, and
crack, and to disgorge, at its ever-increasing flaws and openings,
streams of turbid water,--let no one presume to affirm that the
after-process is to be slow. In mayhap one minute more, in a few
minutes at most, stones, sticks, turf, the whole dam-dyke, in short,
but a dam-dyke no longer, will be roaring adown the stream,
wrapped up in the womb of an irresistible wave. Now there have been
palpable openings, during the last few months, in the Protectionist
dam-head. We pointed years since to the rising of the water, and
predicted that it would prevail at last. But the droughts were
protracted, and the river low. Good harvests and brisk trade went
hand in hand together; and the Protectionist dam-head--though feeble
currents and minute waves beat against it, and the accumulation
within rose by half-inches and eighth-parts--stood sure. But the river
is now high in flood--the waters are toppling over--the yielding
masonry has begun to bulge and crack. The Queen's Speech, when we
consider it as emanating from a Conservative Ministry, indicates a
tremendous flaw; the speech of Sir Robert Peel betrays an irreparable
bulge; the sudden conversions to free-trade principles of officials
and place-holders show a general outpouring at opening rents and
crannies: depend on it, Protectionists, your dam-dyke, patch or
prop it as you please, is on the eve of destruction; yet a very
little longer, and it will be hurtling down the stream.

For what purpose, do we say? Simply in the hope of awakening to a
sense of their true interest, ere it be too late, a class of the
Scottish people in which we feel deeply interested,--we mean the
tenant agriculturists of the kingdom. They have in this all-important
crisis a battle to fight; and if they do not fight and win it, they
will be irrevocably ruined by hundreds and thousands. The great
Protectionist battle--the battle in which they may make common cause
with their landlords if they will, against the League, and the
Free-Trade Whigs, and Sir Robert Peel,