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the business in an eloquent speech, in which he alluded to a long succession of synods, and councils, and meetings of ministers of religion for various purposes, recorded in ecclesiastical history, and said:—

"The meeting of that morning was unprecedented and unparalleled, convened not to place themselves in hostile array sect against sect, and party against party, within the narrow lines of sectarian demarkation; not to hurl against each other the brutum fulmen of excommunication, placing on the unhappy victims of their wrath the ban of exclusive impiety here, and final perdition hereafter, and not to harmonise the jarring Shiboleth of conflicting creeds; but impressed with an object greater than which can hardly enter into the mind of the most eminent Christian, and less than which will not satisfy our aspirations." He vindicated the conference from the charge that they were acting out of the line of their duty as Christian ministers. "I have yet to learn," said he, "that that Christianity which was adapted, not only to man's mental and moral, but to his social condition, does violence to the exercise of, or extinguishes the intensity of that great social principle, by which the hearts of men are linked together throughout the whole human race."

After contrasting the greatness of our country in arts and arms, in science and literature, in commercial interprise and manufacturing skill, with the distress which prevailed among our artizans and peasants, he thus described the cause of the anomaly:—

"On the other side of the water is a land in which, either from the paucity of its population or the fertility of its soil, there is bread enough and to spare. There they have the pabulum of life sufficient to repay the labour of industry, and to supply the wants of necessity. Yes, gentlemen—for while I would use caution, I will not indulge in cowardice—yes, and your starving population is willing to purchase that pabulum of life; not, indeed, with wealth,—for, like the poor disciples of a poorer master, they shake their tattered garments, and say, 'Silver and gold we have none,' but they are willing to purchase food with the well-strained sinews of nervous industry, with the sweat of their honest brows. And why cannot they purchase that? Why is there not the promotion of that simple, but no less effectual arrangement in the economy of the universe, by which the various productions of one country may be reciprocated with advantage, by communications made from another? Why is this machinery, so simple in its construction,