POLITICAL FRAGMENTS.

A GENERAL REMARK.

WE have long been a people highly favoured among the nations. Beyond all former example riches long continued to increase among us, and have adorned the British Isles. Every art has been improved, every science extended; all the accommodations of private life have been augmented; we have seen Europe desolated by wide-wasting war, from the vicinity of the Polar circle to the Mediterranean Sea, while no enemy has insulted our shores. The British empire has been extended over the globe till the sun no longer sets upon it In spite of sanguinary conflicts fought at a dis

tance, the numbers of our people have augmented, and have carried our commerce, our language, our literature, our laws, and our religion to the most distant regions. Still I never reflect on the subject without thinking of what is said of the feet of the image in Nebuchadnezzar's vision, as applicable, not prophetically, but descriptively, to the British empire. They were " part of iron, and part of clay," and a stone cut out of the mountain, without hands, could destroy them. "Whereas, thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potter's clay, and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay; and as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken (or brittle)..... ......they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay."

Britain in one sense is strong as iron. Her marine warriors have been unrivalled by any nation, and her land forces, at the end of a long war, proved at least a match in that terrible art for the most skilful and the bravest. Still the empire contains much of the potter's clay. Its scattered

branches or "toes" are very frail;-disjointed in Canada, barbarous in the black population of the West Indian islands, and made up of millions upon millions of a feeble race of Gentoos, Mahommedans, and worshippers of Budho, inhabiting the great territories from the south of Ceylon to the Himmalaya mountains. All Europe greedily gazes on those rich eastern provinces. Even our AngloAmerican brethren look eagerly towards the same prize. Any convulsion at home would deprive us of these rich settlements, and of all that influx of wealth which daily pours in upon us from thence, in the shape of private fortunes brought home by individuals. Amidst its Revolution, France lost its colonies; Spain sustained a similar loss, and so I would Britain ; nay, without a convulsion, the gradual growth of the American states threatens the same result. It would even follow from any important additional improvement in navigation, which should enable a great military power to elude at all times with certainty the vigilance of our fleets.

Our hundred millions of Hindoos form emphatically the potter's clay of the empire. They can

never be fully incorporated with the free-born, the bold, the intelligent European Islanders. We and they cannot "cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay." The British empire therefore is essentially weak, when its strength is compared with its magnitude. Its strength consists of the population of the British Isles, capable at all times of becoming military; and, if supplied with the means of warfare by Oriental riches, сарable of contending with advantage against any European people of double their numbers, not so supplied or supported. Its weakness consists in the scattered and remote situation of its parts, and the imperfections of its colonial population, rendering them subjects of plunder and not instruments of power.

To hold together such an empire it is necessary that the capital, that is to say, the British Isles, shall possess not merely an ascendancy over the colonies, but that the name and power of these islands shall be great and formidable in the eyes of other nations, and still more, that no rottenness shall exist in the moral and political condition and arrangements of the European part of the State.