There were very severe laws against emigration, and fully enforced as late as 1817; but they were all repealed in the reign of George IV. The stamp act of Grenville, in 1764, (under George III.,) was one of the immediate causes of the American war. How wise were those brave men in opposing it. The amount of that one item of their immense taxation was £6,500,000 in 1830. The population of the city New York, taken by order of the king in the year 1697, was 3727. I have seen a statement that it was only 1000 in 1656. In 1843, upward of 300,000. If these enumerations are correct, this is a very rapid increase. The first writer on those wonders of the world, the Falls of Niagara, was a French Jesuit, in the year 1678.* In 1688 Sir Josiah Childe foretold the Americans would be the rivals of the English. I have no doubt this influential man's prediction had a very powerful effect upon all the British councils from the day it was penned to the ever-memorable day on which George the III. is reported to have said to the first American ambassador, “I was the first to go into the war, and the last to go out of it." Oh! what a salutation! How many reflections rush into the mind! But I must stop, and leave them to be detailed by some future historian. Davenant says the average annual value of exports from England to America, of all kinds of apparel and household furniture, for six years, from 1682 to 1688, was about £350,000. The importations in return were tobacco, cocoa, fish, pipestaves, masts, furs, sugar, ginger, cotton, fustic, and indigo. Furs and fish were sent from Newfoundland to the amount of £950,000. Of these imports there might be retained, for home consumption, about £350,000; £600,000 re-exported. If I say but little about the cotton trade, it must be considered there was not, before the reign of George III., any article made exclusively of cotton; and there have been some very I have not been so fortunate as to meet with what he wrote, but I apprehend he could not have seen them under more favourable circumstances than the following, from the Lockport Balance, 1834: "The Falls of Niagara present at this time a spectacle of unusual magnificence. On the American side the spray has formed an immense mass of ice, extending nearly across the foot of the fall, and more than a hundred feet in height. From the summit of the ice the spray rises like smoke from a volcano. The fall between Goat Island and the Tower is incrusted with ice, except a space some twenty feet wide, midway in its descent. Below are enormous and fantastic shapes of ice, mounds, caverns, and grottoes: against the dark rock of the island hang icicles thirty and forty feet in length, of the purest white and blue; the river itself, flashing with ice broken into innumerable fragments-and the rainbow spanning the whole -presents a scene surpassing the wildest dreams of the imagination." important treatises upon the subject. The consumption of cotton last year was 1,417,300 bales. Locke wrote a constitution for both North and South Carolina, which could not be carried into effect: there were one hundred and twenty articles, combining a feudal nobility. According to the first American census taken, in 1790, the number was 3,929,526 souls, of which 695,655 were slaves. The amount of emigration to this port seems to be as follows: There was no record before 1827; in that year there arrived 10,412. The smallest number was in 1830; in that year they were only 9,127; in 1836 the number was 58,597; in 1840 there were 56,274. The average for fourteen years was 32,215, and eight over, per year. The total number arrived in all the ports in the year 1840, was 115,206, by sea. The number of passengers last year to this port alone was 74,940; and to Canada, 42,355. A great proportion of these emigrants came through the house of Caleb Grimshaw & Co., 10 Goree Piazzas, Liverpool, to the old established house of Samuel Thompson, Emigrant Office, 273 Pearl-street, in this city; who regularly and faithfully remit sums of money obtained by the hard-earned labour of industrious emigrants, to their friends and relatives in all parts of the three kingdoms with the greatest despatch. A. xv. In the year 1605 was born Hugh Audley, some time of the court of wards and liveries, who began with £200, and died in 1662 worth £400,000. In his time he was called "the great Audley," an epithet so often abused, and here applied to the creation of enormous wealth. But there are minds of great capacity concealed by the nature of their pursuits; and the wealth of Audley may be considered as the cloudy medium through which a brighter genius shone, of which, had it been thrown into a nobler sphere of action, greatness would have been less ambiguous. The legal interest was then "ten in the hundred ;"* but the thirty, the fifty, and the hundred for the hundred, the gripe of usury, and the shameless contrivances of the money-traders exacted, these he would attribute to the follies of others, or to his own genius. This genius of thirty per cent. had proved the decided vigour of his mind, by his enthusiastic devotion to his law studies: deprived of the leisure for study through his busy day, he stole the hours from his late nights and early mornings; and, without the means to procure a law library, he invented a method to possess one without cost: as fast as he learned, he taught; and, by publishing some useful tracts on temporary occasions, he was enabled to purchase a library. He appears never to have read a book without its furnishing him with some new practical design; and he probably studied none too much for his own particular advantage. Such devoted study was the way to become a lord chancellor; but the science of the law was here subordinate to that of a money-trader. When yet but a clerk to the clerk in the counter, frequent opportunities occurred which Audley knew how to improve. He became a money-trader as he became a law writer, and the fears and follies of mankind were to furnish him with a trading capital. The fertility of his genius appeared in expedients and quick contrivances. He was sure to be the friend of all men falling out. He took a deep concern in the affairs of his master's clients, and often much more than they were aware of. No man so ready at procuring bail or compounding debts. This was a considerable traffic. He had men at his command who hired themselves out for bail, swore what was required, and contrived to give false addresses. They dressed themselves out for the occasion, a great seal-ring flamed on the finger, which, however, was pure copper gilt, the only article of purity about them; and they often assumed the names of some persons of good credit. Savings, and small presents for gratuitous opinions, often afterward discovered to be fallacious ones, enabled him to purchase annuities of easy land-holders, with *In Stratford-upon-Avon church is a monument to John Combe, Esq., who died July 10th, 1614. He was a neighbour and an acquaintance of Shakspeare, and is said to have been so much disliked for his usurions practices, that he composed on him the following extemporaneous lines as a satirical epitaph: "Ten in the hundred lies here ingraved, 'Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved; If any one ask who lies in this tomb, Oh! oh!' quoth the devil, 'tis my John-a-Combe.'" treble amount secured on their estates. The improvident owners or the careless heirs were soon entangled in the usurer's nets; and, after the receipt of a few years, the annuity, by some latent quibble, or some irregularity in the payments, usually ended in Audley's obtaining the treble forfeiture. He could at all times out knave a knave: in the language of Spencer, "As for virtue, he counted it but a school name. One of these incidents has been preserved. A draper, of no honest reputation, being arrested by a merchant for a debt of £200, Audley bought the debt for £40, for which the draper immediately offered him £50; but Audley would not consent, unless the draper indulged a sudden whim of his own: this was a formal contract, that the draper should pay within twenty years, upon certain days, a penny doubled. "A knave in haste to sign is no calculator ;" and, as the contemporary dramatist describes one of the arts of those citizens, one part of whose business was "to swear and break, they all grew rich by breaking," the draper eagerly compounded. He afterward grew rich; Audley, silently watching his victim, within two years claimed his doubled pennies every month during twenty months. The pennies had now grown to pounds. The knave perceived the trick, and preferred paying the forfeiture of his bond for £500, rather than to receive the visitation of all the little generation of compound interest in the last descendant of £2000, which would have closed with the draper's shop. Such petty enterprizes at length assumed a deeper cast of interest. He formed temporary partnerships with the stewards of country gentlemen: they underlet estates which they had to manage; and, anticipating the owners' necessities, the estates in due time became cheap purchases for Audley and the stewards. He usually contrived to make the wood pay for the land, which he called "making the feathers pay for the goose." He had, however, such a tenderness of conscience for his victim, that, having plucked the live feathers before he sent the unfledged goose on the common, he would bestow a gratuitous lecture in his own science, teaching the art of making them grow again, by showing how to raise the remaining rents. Audley thus made the tenant furnish at once the means to satisfy his own rapacity and his employer's necessities. "Under an easy landlord," says Audley," a tenant seldom thrives, contenting himself to make the just measure of his rents, and not labouring for any surplusage of estate; under a hard one the tenant revenges himself upon the land, and runs away with the rent. I would raise my rents to the present price of all commodities; for if we should let our lands go on in price, we should fall backward in our estates." When a borrowing lord complained to Audley of his exactions, his lordship exclaimed: "What, do you not intend to use a conscience ?" "Yes, I intend hereafter to use it; we moneyed people must balance accounts; if you do not pay me, you cheat me; but if you do, then I cheat your lordship." Audley's moneyed conscience balanced the risk of his lordship's honour. When he resided in the Temple, among those "pullets without feathers," as an old writer describes the brood, the good man would pule out paternal homilies on improvident youth, grieving that they, under pretence of learning the law, only learned to be lawless, and never knew by their own studies the process of an execution till it was served on themselves. Nor could he fail in his prophecy; for at the moment that the stoic was enduring their ridicule, his agents were supplying them with the certain means of verifying it; for, as it is quaintly said, he had his decoying as well as his decaying gentlemen. The arts practised by the money-traders of that time have been detailed by one of the town satirists of the age—Dekkar, in his "English Villainies." The reign of James I. is characterized by all the wantonness of prodigality among one class, and all the penuriousness and rapacity of the other, which met in the dissolute indolence of a peace of twenty years. Audley's worldly wisdom was of that sort which derives its strength from the weakness of mankind: everything was to be obtained by stratagem; and it was his maxim, that, to grasp our object the faster, we must go a little round about it. His life is said to have been one of intricacies and mysteries, using indirect means in all things: if he walked in a labyrinth, it was to bewilder others, for the clue was still in his own hands; all he sought was, that his designs should not be discovered by his actions. His word, we are told, was his bond; his hour was punctual, and his opinions were compressed and weighty. But if he were true to his bond-word, it was only a part of the system, to give facility to the carrying on of his trade, for he was not strict to his honour; lawyer as he was, he had not the noble notion of honour that the author of Hudibras had: "Honour's a lease for lives to come, And cannot be extended from The pride of victory, as well as the vile passion for acquisition, combined in the character of Audley as in more tremendous conquerors. His partners dreaded the effects of his law library, and usually relinquished a claim rather than stand a suit against a latent quibble. When one menaced him by showing some |