denly sunk from one hundred to fifty millions. Upwards of 300,000 persons-men in the prime of life_were discharged from the army and navy, and all the numerous classes of industry which were directed to the stores or munitions of war, and which had grown up to an unexampled height during the enormous expenditure of its latter years, were at once thrown out of employment. It may safely be affirmed, that a nation never was, with out some great external calamity, exposed to more general and searching causes of distress; and their effect was such as completely to obliterate for many years all the benefits that might have been expected to arise from the termination of hostilities, and the general resumption of pacific relations throughout the globe.

The next circumstance which had a most powerful effect in impeding the operations of finance during the last ten years of the Tory Governmentand from the effects of which the nation has, perhaps, not yet fully recovered-was, the famous resumption of cash payments by the bill of 1819, followed by that for the extinction of small notes in England in 1826. With out entering into the often-debated and difficult question of the currency, it seems sufficient to observe, that the vast change made by these two bills unquestionably had the effect of permanently lowering prices at least a third, and of consequently throwing a loss to that extent upon all the holders of commodities, and augmenting, in the same proportion, the burden of the whole debt, public and private, in the community. The simultaneous benefit conferred by the same change upon annuitants, and those whose income and money was fixed, afforded but a slender compensation for these manifold evils; for, in a manufacturing country, where so very large a proportion of the people gain their livelihood by buying and selling, to be obliged to buy dear and sell cheap, was the most ruinous of matters: and in a country where the great bulk of the landholders were deeply involved in debt, the combined effect of the diminution of their rents, and the increase of the weight of interest, was such as to produce universal distress, and very general bankruptcy. These facts may be considered as now historically certain; and there is hardly a member, we

have reason to know, of the Committee of 1819, who is not convinced of the disastrous effect, at least for the ten subsequent years, of the measure, which was then lauded by all the philosophers of the age, as the summit of human wisdom. Without entering into this fiercely advocated controversy, whether it was necessary or expedient to make this great change or not, it seems sufficient to observe, that the change, when made, was attended with the most disastrous present consequences; and that the power of the Tory Government, from 1820 to 1830, to go on with the reduction of the debt, was in a great measure paralysed by the vast change, which at once added a third to the amount of the national burdens, and took away a third from the means which the people had to pay them.

In both these respects, the situation of the Whig Government, since their accession to power in November 1830, has been so widely different from that of their predecessors, that one is almost tempted to believe that nature had been prodigal of her gifts to them, in order to render utterly inexcusable their misapplication of her bounties. The harvests in the four years from 1832 to 1835, were so uncommonly fine, that the price of wheat in the latter year fell to 39s. a-quarter-less than one-third what it had been during the latter years of the war, and lower than it had been since the days of Oliver Cromwell. The effect of the vast accumulation of the means of subsistence which these fine seasons afforded, was not merely to diffuse plenty and contentment throughout the land, and enable the nation to bear in comparative tranquillity the great political excitement and convulsion which took place in those years, but to induce the more remote, though not the less important, and now thoroughly understood consequence of keeping the mercantile exchanges generally favourable to this country, and preventing the occurrence of that ruinous drain of the precious metals, which arises from the necessity of making extensive purchases of grain in foreign parts for domestic consumption. The immense harvests which annually rewarded the labours of the husband. man, produced a vast stock of grain in the country, which soon superseded all application to foreign quarters;

prices fell so low as to render the protection of the corn laws for the time unnecessary; the low cost of provisions unaccompanied, from its recent occurrence, by a corresponding fall in the wages of labour, diffused contentment and ease throughout the labouring classes, and augmented, to a prodigious degree, from the surplus which they found at their disposal, the domestic market for our manufactures; while the favourable state of the foreign exchanges, produced by the non-importation of grain, prevented the currence of any drain for specie upon the Bank, and averted during five years of sunshine the recurrence of those commercial crises, which in a complicated state of society spread such misery and consternation through the manufacturing classes.

re

Add to this, the ruinous and distressing transition from high to low prices which had been made before the Whigs came into office; - they were wafted into power by the discontent which that change produced, and they found the effects of the discontent nearly exhausted when they assumed the reins of government.

During

the twelve years which had elapsed from 1819 to 1831, the change in the currency had done its work, and the great commercial crisis of December 1825 had swept away nearly all the trading establishments which did not possess so strong a foundation of solid capital as to be able to resist the calamitous consequence of a fall of one-third in the average price of all the commodities, and the addition of one-third to every debt in the kingdom. This was a circumstance of almost unparalleled good fortune to the Whig party. They came into office just when the change had completed its effects; the numerous classes whom it had consigned to beggary and ruin were dead, bankrupt, or gone into voluntary exile, and the inexhaustible energies of a free country had produced a new race of active enterprising men, prepared to advance their own and their nation's fortunes with all the advantages of the reduced rate of prices, and the extensive openings to fresh enterprise which the unparalleled bankruptcies of the preceding ten years had occasioned. No one can doubt, that the unprecedented commercial prosperity of 1834, 35, and 36, is mainly to be ascribed to the ex.

traordinary combination of the fine harvests of those years with the termination of the transition from high to low prices. And as if to complete the good fortune of the Liberal party, general peace has been preserved ved in Europe, notwithstanding their ceaseless efforts to break it in the Low Countries, Spain, and Portugal-the severe depression of the agricultural interest, from the low prices of the five years terminating in 1836, has been relieved by the high prices of the last three years; while, at the same time, such has been the extent of our foreign commerce, in consequence of the continued peace and rapid growth of our colonial settlements, that our manufacturing industry has undergone no diminution from the unfavourable state of the foreign exchanges which arose from the late bad harvests, and the last year exhibited the prodigy of our exports rising to one hundred and five millions, at the time when grain had risen almost to the average price at the middle of the war, and the agricultural classes of all descriptions were reanimated by the vivifying influence of more than remunerating prices.

What, then, during the nine years of such extraordinary, unheard-of good fortune, and external and internal prosperity, have been the financial measures of the Whig Government? Have they taken advantage of this unlooked-for flood of prosperity, arising from the bounty of nature and no wisdom of their own, to effect a great and annually increasing reduction of the national debt? Have they, by the vigour and wisdom of their financial operations, raised the three per cents to par, and been enabled to realise in that way the extraordinary commermercial prosperity of 1836, in the reduction of the interest of the three per cents to two and a half, and thereby saved the nation a sixth part of the interest of that portion of the funded debt, or nearly four millions sterling a-year? Have they nursed up and increased the real sinking fund of L.2,600,000 a-year, which the Duke of Wellington left them in November 1830, and brought it up now to the standard of five millions, below which the House of Commons, by a solemn and wise resolution in 1821, declared it never should be lowered? They have done none of these things. So

On 1st January 1839.

Funded, Unfunded,

L.785,239,647

793,760,883

8,521,236

L.27,657,004

793,031

28,450,035

L.28,669,332

720,928

29,390,260

L.940,225

And a clear sinking fund left of

L.79,500,000

*

And these results are the more remarkable, when it is recollected that the Tory reductions were effected during fifteen years of extraordinary pressure and suffering, arising from the transition from war to peace, bad seasons, and the change of the currency; while the Whig increase of burdens during the last nine years has taken place when the suffering arising from the change in the currency had been got over, and in the midst of unexampled fine seasons during the first five years, and unprecedented commercial and manufacturing prosperity in the last four.

This extraordinary reduction of the revenue within the last few years appears the more extraordinary, when it is considered how vast a sum was raised, with comparative ease, during the war, and how inconsiderable were

Thus, since 1815, the population of the empire has increased nearly a half; our exports have more than doubled, our imports have doubled, our shipping has advanced a sixth, while the revenue has been brought down to little more than two-thirds of its former amount. No one can doubt that a great reduction of taxation, upon the termination of the war, was both necessary and expedient; but it is also apparent from these details, that the reduction has been both uncalled-for and excessive, and that the vast increase in the resources of the state in every department would have enabled the nation, under any prudent or rational system of government, to have provided with ease a real sinking fund of ten millions annually, to be applied to the reduction of debt-in other words, to have paid off already four hundred millions of the national debt.

The cause to which this woeful and unexpected result is to be ascribed, is obviously the same with that to which the large encroachments on the sinking fund, and the abandonment of Mr Pitt's admirable system for the reduction of the debt, is to be ascribed, viz. -the undue preponderance of the voice of the unthinking many in the Legislature, and the increasing necessity to

the population and resources of the British empire at that time, compared with those upon whom the burden of the supplies is at present to be laid. In order to illustrate this matter, we have compiled, from official and authentic sources, a statement of the population, exports, imports, tonnage, and revenue of the British empire in the years 1815, 1816, and 1839. And the contrast they exhibit is so extraordinary and so strikingly illustrative of the weakness of the Government which, with such resources, has allowed the revenue so miserably to dwindle away, that we here insert it as illustrative both of the elements and national strength which were at the disposal of Government, and the miserable use which they have actually made of them.

2,681,000 72,210,000 2,783,933 62,264,000 2,785,387 47,333,459

which Government has been reduced ever since the peace, of courting popularity on all occasions, and sacrificing the ultimate interest of the state to the passion for economical reduction on the part of the middle classes of society.

These middle classes possess many admirable qualities; it is in their industry and accumulations that is to be found the source of almost all the wealth of the state, and their vigilant oversight is of the highest importance at all times, to prevent the Government from perverting the national funds to the purposes of Parliamentary interest or patrician corruption. But they are altogether unfitted to assume the direct management of financial concerns, for this plain reason, that present economy and reduction of taxation is with them at all times an absolute passion, while their habits of business and station in life prevent them from acquiring those general and systematic views for the regulation of public affairs, which are indispensable to the durable welfare or prosperity of a nation. There is nothing so easy as for any Government, which has no regard for the ultimate welfare of the state, to gain the suffrages and ensure the present support of that class of society. They have nothing to do but to go on taking off tax after tax every year, carefully to abstain from ever laying on a new one, and to hold out the prospect of a still greater and boundless relief from burdens, to ensure the support of the great bulk of the shopocracy throughout the empire; and this popularity will continue as long as present relief can be purchased by the progressive unwinding of the springs of the state. Doubtless, such a system must ere long come to an end. Present relief and ultimate welfare cannot co-exist for any considerable time in an old state heavily burdened with debt; the day of reckon ing must come to the statesmen who thus live on the ultimate resources of the empire. The national security endangered, the national honour will be tarnished_the national resources extinguished by such a disastrous course of proceeding; and certainly many years cannot pass away before these effects are sensibly felt, and the unthinking applause of the moment is converted into the lasting execrations of ages. But still the evil is done, and is irreparable: the precious period of salvation, never to be regained, has passed away; the tide-stop of the flood has permanently changed into ebb; and the means of regaining the former vantage-ground have ever disappeared. When the Roman legions drew their lines round the devoted city of Carthage, the people saw clearly how egregiously they had been misled by their former demaogues, and lamented, with tears of anguish, their blind insensibility to the counsels of Hannibal; but all that could not recal the days of Cannæ and Thrasymenæ.

for

classes are one iota inferior in mental capacity to the higher, or that there are not to be found men in their ranks

What we

perfectly capable of filling the highest offices, and wielding the greatest powers of government. say is, that the science of government, like every other complicated art or science in the world, requires long previous study and preparation; and that no persons can conduct it well, either directly by taking the lead, or indirectly by governing the leaders, but those who have made it the object of study for a course of years, and devoted their lives to the acquisition of its principles and the mastery of its details. We say that the middle and the lower classes are unfit to be intrusted with the duties of self government, not because they are inferior in original capacity to the professional statesman, but because they have never learned his art.

Turn to common life, and see how universally the truth of this principle is understood and acted upon in the ordinary concerns of men. The whole of society is divided into different classes, trades, or professions; and no one ever imagines, that because he is master of one profession or handicraft, he is on that account capable of undertaking another. Afarmer considersitno opprobrium to be told that he does not

understand the business of a merchant -the most profound lawyer pretends to no acquaintance with the medical art, and a first-rate tailor advances no pretensions to the skill in their several departments of a shoemaker, an upholsterer, or a printer. But, unfortunately, all these different trades and professions, though perfectly aware that their skill is confined to their own peculiar line of life, and that they are altogether incompetent to judge of the merits of other professions or workmanship, conceive themselves perfectly qualified to exercise the functions, or judge of the conduct of statesmen-a profession requiring ten times more study than all the handicrafts in the island put together, and at least as much patient assiduity and application as the sciences either of law or medicine.

No one thinks, in civilized or rational society, of proclaiming the principle of self-clothing, or self-furnishing of houses; and every body knows, that the attempt to make every man his own doctor or lawyer, soon becomes