The harmony of true interests among nations is perfect, and an enlightened self-interest would lead every nation to carry into full effect the golden rule of Christianity; and yet even now, the most distinguished men in England regard smuggling almost as a virtuous act, and the smuggler as a great reformer, because his labours tend to enable their countrymen to do everywhere what has been done in the West Indies, in Ireland, Portugal, Turkey, and India--separate the consumer from the producer. They regard it as the appointed work of England to convert the whole earth into one vast farm dependent upon one vast workshop, and that shop in the island of Great Britain. Such being the views of peers of the realm, lord chancellors, ministers of state, political economists, and statisticians, can we wonder at a decline of morality among the middle class, under the combined influence of the struggle for life, and the assurance that "the end sanctifies the means," and that false invoices are but a means of working out a great reformation in the commercial system of the world? Good ends rarely require such means for their accomplishment, and the very fact that it was needed to have Gibraltar as a means of smuggling into Spain, Canada as a means of smuggling into this country,[131] and Hong Kong for the purpose of poisoning the Chinese with smuggled opium, should have led to a careful consideration of the question whether or not the system which looked to exhausting the soil of Virginia and driving the poor negro to the sugar culture in Texas, was one of the modes of "doing God service."
Unsound moral feeling is a necessary consequence of an exclusive devotion to trade such as is now seen to exist in England. It is the business of the trader to buy cheaply and sell dearly, be the consequences what they may to those from whom he buys, or to whom he sells; and unhappily the prosperity of England now depends so entirely on buying cheaply and selling dearly that she is forced to overlook the effects upon those to whom she sells, or from whom she buys, and she therefore rejoices when others are being ruined, and grieves when they are being enriched. Her interests are always, and necessarily so, opposed to those of the rest of the world. She _must_ look at every thing with the eyes of the mere trader who wishes to buy cheaply and sell dearly, living at the cost of the producer and the consumer. The former desires good prices for his sugar, and yet so anxious was she to obtain cheap sugar that she forgot her engagements with the poor emancipated negroes of Jamaica. The former desire's good prices for his corn, but so anxious was she to have cheap corn, that she forgot having deprived the people of Ireland of all employment but in agriculture, and at once adopted measures whose action is now expelling the whole nation from the scenes of their youth, and separating husbands and wives, mothers and children. She has placed herself in a false position, and cannot now _afford_ to reflect upon the operation of cheap sugar and cheap corn, cheap cotton and cheap tobacco, upon the people who produce them; and therefore it is that the situation of Ireland and India, and of the poor people Of Jamaica, is so much shut out from discussion. Such being the case with those who should give tone to public opinion, how can we look for sound or correct feeling among the poor occupants of "the sweater's den,"[132] or among the 20,000 tailors of London, seeking for work and unable to find it? Or, how look for it among the poor shopkeepers, compelled in self-defence to adulterate almost every thing they sell, when they see the great cotton manufacturer using annually hundreds of barrels of flour to enable him to impose worthless cloth upon the poor Hindoo, and thus annihilate his foreign competitor? Or, how expect to find it among the poor operatives of Lancashire, at one moment working full time, at another but three days in a week, and at a third totally deprived of employment, because goods can no longer be smuggled into foreign countries to leave a profit? With them, the question of food or no food is dependent altogether upon the size of the cotton crop. If the slave trade is brisk, much cotton is made, and they have wages with which to support their wives and children. If the crop is large, the planter may be ruined, but they themselves are fed. "The weekly mail from America," we are told--