truth of the Marquis of Granby's observation, that, under such a reduction, the whole producing classes must lose more than they can by possibility gain, because their loss is upon their whole income, their gain only upon that portion of their means-seldom more than a half-which is spent on the purchase of articles, the cost of which is affected by the fall of prices.

The most decisive proof of the universality and general sense of this reduction of income and general distress, is to be found in the efforts which Mr Cobden and the free-trade party are now making to effect a great reduction in the public expenditure. During the discussion on corn-law repeal, they told us that the change they advocated could make no sort of difference on the income of the producing and agricultural classes, and that it would produce an addition to the income of the trading classes of £100,000,000 a-year. Of course, the national and public resources were to be greatly benefited by the change; and it was under this belief adopted. Now, however, that the change has taken place, and its result has been found to be a universal embarrassment to all classes and interests, but especially to the commercial, they turn round and tell us that this effect is inevitable from the change of prices-that the halcyon days of high rents and profits are at an end, and that all that remains is for all classes to accommodate themselves the best way they can to the inevitable change. They propose to begin with Queen Victoria and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, from whom they propose to cut off £11,000,000 a-year of income. But they consider this perfectly safe, because, as the aspect of things, both abroad and in our colonial empire, is so singularly pacific, and peace and goodwill are so soon to prevail among men, they think it will be soon possible to disband our troops, sell our ships of war, and trust the stilling the passions and settling the disputes of nations and races to the great principles of justice and equity, which invariably regulate the proceedings of all popular and democratic communities. We say nothing of the probability of such a millennium soon arriving, or of the prognostics of its

approach, which passing and recent events in India, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Sicily, and Ireland, have afforded, or are affording. We refer to them only as giving the most decisive proof that the freetraders have now themselves become sensible that their measures have produced a general impoverishment of all classes, from the head of the state downwards, and that a great reduction of expenditure is unavoidable, if a general public and private bankruptcy would be averted.

In truth, the proofs of this general impoverishment are now so numerous and decisive, that they have brought conviction home to the minds of the most obdurate, and, with the exception of the free-trade leaders or agitators-whose fanaticism is, of course, fixed and incurable-have produced a general distrust of the new principles. A few facts will place them in the most striking light. The greatest number of emigrants who had previously sailed from the British shores was in 1839, when they reached 129,000. But in the year 1847, the sacred year of free trade and a fettered currency, they rose at once to 258,270. In 1848 they were 248,000. The number this year is understood to be still greater, and composed almost entirely, not of paupers-who, of course, cannot get away-but of the better sort of mechanics, tradesmen, and small farmers, who, under the new system, find their means of subsistence dried up. The poor-rate in England has now risen to £7,000,000 annuallyas much in nominal amount as it was in 1834, when the new poor-law was introduced by the Whig government, and, if the change in the value of money is taken into account, half as much more. A seventh of the British empire are now supported in the two islands by the parish rates, and yet the demands on private charity are hourly increasing. Crime is universally and rapidly on the increase: in Ireland, where the commitments never before exceeded 21,000, they rose in 1848 to 39,000. In England, in the same year, they were 30,000; in Scotland, 4908; all a great increase over previous years. It is not surprising crime was so prolific in a country where, in the preceding year, at least

250,000 persons died of famine, in spite of the noble grant of £10,000,000 from the British treasury for their support. We extract from the Standard of Freedom the following summary of some of the social results which have followed the adoption of liberal principles :

"STATE OF ENGLAND.-One man in every ten, according to Sir J. Graham, a short time ago was in receipt of parish relief in this country; but now, it appears, from a return up to June last, it is not 10 per cent, but 11 per cent of the population who receive parochial relief; for the persons so relieved amount to 1,700,000 out of 15,000,000. £7,000,000 was raised annually for the relief of the poor in England, and £500,000 in Scotland; and, taking the amount collected for and raised in Ireland at £1,860,957, it makes a total of £9,460,957, as the sum levied annually in the British empire for the relief of the poor, or three times the cost of the civil government, independently of the cost of the army and navy. Besides the regular standing force, there is the casual poor, a kind of disposable force, moving about and exhausting every parish they go through. In 1815, there were 1,791 vagrants in one part of the metropolis, and, in 1828, in the same district in London, they had increased to 16,086. In 1832, the number was 35,600, which had increased, in 1847, to 41,743. Moreover, there is a certain district south of the Thames, in which, for the six months ending September 1846, the number was 18,533, and which had increased, during the same six months in 1847, to 44,937. And, in the county of York, in one of the first unions in the West Riding, in 1836, one vagrant was relieved, and, in 1847, 1,161. This affords a pretty strong, dark, and gloomy picture of the state of destitation prevailing in this country.”Standard of Freedom.

General as the distress is which, under the combined operations of free trade and a fettered currency, has been brought upon the country, there is one circumstance of peculiar impor

tance which has not hitherto, from the efforts of the free-traders to conceal it, met with the attention it deserves. This is the far greater amount of ruin and misery theyhave brought upon the commercial classes, who supported, than the agriculturists, who opposed them. The landed interest is only beginning to experience, in the present low prices, the depressing effects of free trade. The Irish famine has hitherto concealed or postponed them. London is suffering, but not so much as the provincial towns, from its being the great place where the realised wealth of the country is spent. But the whole commercial classes in the manufacturing towns have felt them for nearly two years in the utmost intensity. It is well known that, during that short period, one-half of the wealth realised, and in course of realisation, in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Glasgow, has perished. There is no man practically acquainted with these cities who will dispute that fact.

The poor-rates of Glasgow, which, five years ago, did not exceed £30,000 a-year for the parliamentary city, have now reached £200,000; viz. Glasgow parish, Barony, Gorbals,

£90,000 70,000

40,000

£200,000

The sales by shop-keepers in these towns have not, during three years, been a third of their average amount. All the witnesses examined before the Lords' committee on the public distress, describe this panic of autumn 1847 as infinitely exceeding in duration and severity anything previously experienced; and the state of matters, and the intensity of the shock given to public credit, may be judged of by the following entries as to the state of the Bank of England in June 1845 and October 1847, when the law was suspended :—

Thus, such was the severity of the panic, and the contraction of the currency, consequent on the monetary laws and the operation of free trade in grain, that the nation was all but rendered bankrupt, and half its traders unquestionably were so, when there were still eight millions of sovereigns in the issue department of the bank which could not be touched, while the reserve of notes in the banking department had sunk from nearly £10,000,000, in 1845, to £1,100,000!

So portentous a state of things, fraught as it necessarily was with utter ruin to a great part of the best interests in the empire, was certainly not contemplated by the commercial classes, when they embarked in the crusade of free trade against the productive interests. It might have been long of coming on, and certainly would never have set in with half the severity which actually occurred, had it not been that, not content with the project of forcing down prices by means of the unrestricted admission of foreign produce, they at the same time sought to augment their own fortunes by restricting the currency. It was the double project, beyond all question, which proved their ruin. They began and flattered themselves they would play out successfully the game of "beggar my neighbour," but by pushing their measures too far, it turned into one of "beggar ourselves." It was the double strain of free trade and a fettered currency which brought such embarrassment on the commercial classes, as it was the double strain of the Spanish and Russian wars which proved the destruction of Napoleon. It would appear to be a general law of nature, that great measures of injustice cannot be carried into execution, either by communities or single

Commercial Crisis, 2d edition, 132–133. men, without vindicating the justice of the Divine administration, by bringing down upon themselves the very ruin which they have designed for others.

The free-traders say that there is no general reaction against their principles, and that the formation of a government on protectionist principles is at present impossible. We shall not inquire, and have not the means of knowing, whether or not this statement is well founded. We are willing to accept the statement as true, and we perceive a great social revolution, accompanied with infinite present suffering, but most important ultimate results, growing from their obstinate adherence to their principles in defiance of the lessons of experience. The free-traders are with their own hands destroying the commercial classes, which had acquired an undue preponderance in the state. They must work out their own punishment before they abjure their principles. Every day a free-trading merchant or shopkeeper is swept into the Gazette, and his family cast down to the humblest ranks in society. They go down like the Fifth Monarchy men when expelled the House of Commons by the bayonets of Cromwell, or the Girondists when led to the scaffold by the Jacobins, chanting hymns in honour of their principles when perishing from their effects :

"They are true to the last of their blood and

their breath,

And, like reapers, descend to the harvest of death."

But this constancy of individuals when suffering under the measures they themselves have introduced, however curious and respectable as a specimen of the unvarying effect of fanaticism, whether religious or social,

on the human mind, cannot permanently arrest the, march of events; it cannot stop the effect of their own measures, any more than the courage of the Highlanders in 1745 could prevent the final extinction of the Jacobite cause. Let them adhere to free trade and a fettered currency as they like, the advocates of the new measures are daily and hourly losing their influence. Money constitutes the sinews of war not less in social than in national contests. No cause can be long victorious which is linked to that worst of allies, INSOLVENCY. In two years the mercantile classes have destroyed one-half of their own wealth; in two years more, one-half of what remains will be gone. Crippled, discredited, ruined, beat down by foreign competition, exhausted by the failure of domestic supplies, the once powerful mercantile body of England will be prostrate in the dust. All other classes, of course, will be suffering from their fall, but none in the same degree as themselves. It is not improbable that the land may regain its appropriate influence in the state, by the ruin which their own insane measures have brought upon its oppressors. No one will regret the lamentable consequences of such a change, already far advanced in its progress, more than ourselves, who have uniformly foretold its advent, and strenuously resisted the commercial and monetary changes which, amidst shouts of triumph from the whole Liberal party, were silently but certainly inducing these results.

Confounded at such a series of events, so widely different from what they anticipated and had predicted from their measures, the free-traders have no resource but to lay them all on two external causes, for which they are not, as they conceive, responsible: these causes are, the French and German revolutions, and the potato famine in Ireland.

That the revolutions on the continent of Europe have materially affected the market for the produce of British industry, in the countries where they have occurred, is indeed certain; but are the Liberals entitled to shake themselves free from the consequences of these convulsions? Have we not, for the last thirty years, been labouring incessantly to encourage and ex

VOL. LXVI.-NO. CCCCV.

tend revolution in all the adjoining states? Did we not insidiously and basely support the revolutions in South America, and call a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old? Was not the result of that monstrous and iniquitous interference in support of the rebels in an allied state, to induce the dreadful monetary catastrophe of December 1825, the severest, till that of 1847, ever experienced in modern Europe? Did we not, not merely instantly recognise the French revolutions of 1830 and 1848, but lend our powerful aid and countenance to extend the laudable example to the adjoining states? Did we not join with France to prevent the King of the Netherlands from regaining the command of Flanders in 1832, and blockade the Scheldt while Marshal Gerard bombarded Antwerp? Did we not conclude the Quadruple Alliance to effect the revolutionising of Spain and Portugal, and bathe both countries for four years with blood, to establish revolutionary queens on both the thrones in the Peninsula ? Have we not intercepted the armament of the King of Naples against Sicily, by Admiral Parker's fleet, and aided the insurgents in that island with arms from the Tower? Did we not interfere to arrest the victorious columns of Radetsky at Turin, but never move a step to check Charles Albert on the Mincio? Did we not side with revolutionary Prussia against the Danes, and aid in launching Pio Nono into that frantic career which has spread such ruin through the Italian peninsula? Have we not all but lost the confidence of our old ally, Austria, from our notorious intrigues to encourage the furious divisions which have torn that noble empire? Nay, have we not been so enamoured of revolution, that we could not avoid showing a partiality for it in our own dominions—rewarding and encouraging O'Connell, and allowing monster meetings, till by the neglect of Irish industry we landed them in famine, and by the fanning of Irish passions brought them up to rebellion;-and establishing a constitution in Canada which gave a decided majority in parliament to an alien and rebel race, and, as a necessary consequence, giving the colonial administration to the very part