entertained of the propriety of abandoning a system founded upon error and injustice, and productive of detriment, as well to those who have imposed it, as to those who are suffering under its baneful operation.  It is therefore to be hoped that so unwise and unjust a system will no longer be continued; that his majesty’s government will at length allow the colonists to use freely the natural productions of their country, and to increase to the utmost its artificial ones; that they will, permit them to call their own energies, their own resources, into life and action, and no longer impoverish them by rendering them the prey of richer colonies, and what is still more absurd and vexatious, of foreigners; that they will, in fine, grant them the free unrestricted enjoyment of those privileges which the bounty of the Creator has extended to them, and which it is not in any human authority to withhold, consistently with the eternal, immutable principles of right and equity.

These privileges consist in the removal of certain agricultural and commercial restraints, which I shall separately enumerate; and in a free government, under the protecting shade of which, the colonists may fearlessly exercise and enjoy their personal and private rights, without molestation or hindrance.

PART III.

VARIOUS ALTERATIONS SUGGESTED IN THE PRESENT POLICY OF THIS COLONY.

Of all the steps that could be taken for the relief of the colony, none certainly would prove of such immediate efficacy, as the creation of distilleries, and the imposition of so high a duty on the importation of spirits from abroad, as would amount to a prohibition.  The advantages that would be attendant on this measure may, perhaps, be most forcibly illustrated by a short review of the actual loss which the colonists have sustained during the last fifteen years, from the want of its adoption.  The spirits imported during this period may be safely estimated on an average at the annual value of L10,000, amounting in fifteen years to the sum of L150,000:  and if we add to this L100,000 more, which it may be calculated that the government have expended in this interval, in the importation of corn, flour, rice, etc. from other countries, we have a grand total of L250,000, that would have been saved to the colony by the erection of distilleries.  The application of so large a sum to the immediate encouragement of agriculture, would have imparted life and vigor into the whole community, and would have effectually prevented that increasing poverty, and the black train of evils consequent on it, which I have already depicted.  And although from the increased demand for foreign luxuries, which so great an addition to the colonial income would have naturally occasioned, but a small part perhaps of this sum would have eventually continued in general circulation, still the means of the colonists would have at least