short of the number passed in the four
years of hostilities.

In my first letter I mentioned the state of our inland navigation,
neglected as it had been from the reign of King William to the time of
my observation. It was not till the present reign that the Duke of
Bridgewater's canal first excited a spirit of speculation and adventure
in this way. This spirit showed itself, but necessarily made no great
progress, in the American war. When peace was restored, it began of
course to work with more sensible effect; yet in ten years from that
event the bills passed on that subject were not so many as from the year
1793 to the present session of Parliament. From what I can trace on the
statute-book, I am confident that all the capital expended in these
projects during the peace bore no degree of proportion (I doubt, on
very grave consideration, whether all that was ever so expended was
equal) to the money which has been raised for the same purposes since
the war.[49] I know that in the last four years of peace, when they rose
regularly and rapidly, the sums specified in the acts were not near one
third of the subsequent amount. In the last session of Parliament, the
Grand Junction Company, as it is called, having sunk half a million, (of
which I feel the good effects at my own door,) applied to your House for
permission to subscribe half as much more among themselves. This Grand
Junction is an inosculation of the Grand Trunk; and in the present
session, the latter company has obtained the authority of Parliament to
float two hundred acres of land, for the purpose of forming a reservoir,
thirty feet deep, two hundred yards wide at the head, and two miles in
length: a lake which may almost vie with that which once fed the now
obliterated canal of Languedoc.

The present war is, above all others of which we have heard or read, a
war against landed property. That description of property is in its
nature the firm base of every stable government,--and has been so
considered by all the wisest writers of the old philosophy, from the
time of the Stagyrite, who observes that the agricultural class of all
others is the least inclined to sedition. We find it to have been so
regarded in the practical politics of antiquity, where they are brought
more directly homo to our understandings and bosoms in the history of
Borne, and above all, in the writings of Cicero. The country tribes were
always thought more respectable than those of the