Other and unmistakeable signs of the spirit of commercial combination, or confederation, abroad, and more or less explicitly avowed and directed against this country, are, and have been for some time past, only too patent, day by day, in most of those continental journals, the journals of confederated Germany, of France, with some of those of Spain and of Portugal, which exercise the largest measure of influence upon, and represent with most authority the voice of, public opinion.  Nor are such demonstrations confined to journalism. Collaborateurs, in serial or monthly publications, are found as earnest auxiliaries in the same cause—­as redacteurs and redactores; pamphleteers, like light irregulars, lead the skirmish in front, whilst the main battle is brought up with the heavy artillery of tome and works voluminous.  Of these, as of brochures, filletas, and journals, we have various specimens now on our library table.  All manner of customs, or commercial unions, between states are projected, proposed, and discussed, but from each and all of these proposed unions Great Britain is studiously isolated and excluded.  We have the “Austrian union” planned out and advocated, comprising, with the hereditary states of that empire, Moldavia, Wallachia, Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia, as well as those provinces of ancient Greece, which, like Macedonia, remain subject to Turkey, with, perhaps, the modern kingdom of Greece.  We have the “Italian union,” to be composed of Sardinia, Lombardy, Lucca, Parma, and Modena, Tuscany, the two Sicilies, and the Papal States.  There is the “Peninsular union” of Spain and Portugal.  Then we have one “French union” sketched out, modestly projected for France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Savoy only.  And we have another of more ambitious aspirations, which should unite Belgium, Switzerland, and Spain under the commercial standard of France.  One of the works treating of projects of this kind was, we believe, crowned with a prize by some learned institution in France.

From this slight sketch of what is passing abroad—­and we cannot afford the space at present for more ample development—­the right honourable Vice President of the Board of Trade will perhaps see cause to revise the opinion too positively enounced, that “foreign countries neither have combined, nor ought to combine, nor can combine, against the commerce of Great Britain;” and that it is a “calumny” to conceive that they are “disposed to enter into such a combination.”

With these preliminary remarks, we now proceed to the consideration of the commercial relations between Spain and Great Britain, and of the policy in the interest of both countries, but transcendently in that of Spain, by which those relations, now reposing on the narrowest basis, at least on the one side, on that of Spain herself, may be beneficially improved and enlarged.  It may be safely asserted, that there are no two nations in the old world—­nay