There is no getting over this. Cobbett’s reasoning is the reasoning of every just and honest man who knows anything of the subject. The case is even stronger than he puts it. The bulk of the debt was contracted to force unjust taxation on the American colonies and to force back Bourbon royalty upon France. These are the very last objects upon which the working-classes would expend money or incur liabilities. It is, in fact, making them pay for crime and murder, as well as for their own impoverishment and enslavement!
These views, we rejoice to say, are making way in all quarters, high and low. Mr. Isaac Buchanan (formerly President of the Boards of Trade of Toronto and Hamilton in Canada, and who represented the metropolis of Upper Canada in the Canadian parliament) has boldly demanded that all connection shall cease between the National Debt and her Majesty’s Exchequer, in a pamphlet issued by him, entitled “The Moral Consequences of Sir Robert Peel’s Unprincipled and Fatal Course,” &c. The same view is taken by the democrats of Ireland, and has been successfully promulgated at sundry Chartist meetings in town and country. By-and-by it will be the creed of all classes, as well as of the Chartists and National Reform League.
But while we insist that the owners of realised property shall be held solely responsible for the National Debt, we assert that justice to them demands that the debt be equitably adjusted for them before they are called upon to liquidate it. Peel’s monetary and free-trade measures have more than doubled the debt. We say nothing of the £27,000,000 which our “reformed” parliament has added of late years to the debt; let that pass. We speak of the change made in the value of money by the Act of 1819, restoring cash payments; and of the complete revolution in prices effected by the tariff and corn-law repeal. These measures have more than doubled the value of the pound sterling, and more than trebled the original value of Consols. For example, the average price paid for £100 stock in the 3 per Cents. during the war was £60 of depreciated bank paper, worth then only £40 in silver. The holder of that stock is now entitled to receive ninety-seven sovereigns for it. Every individual pound of the £60, at the time it was lent, would only buy one-fourth of a quarter of wheat. Every pound paid back now will buy more than half a quarter—more than twice as much. It will buy more than three times as much of London or Birmingham goods, and more than four or five times as much of Manchester and Glasgow goods. Here, then, we have the value of the pound more than doubled, on the one hand; and, on the other, we find the fundholder entitled to receive £97 for every £60 he lent in rags! Combine these two alterations: mark their conjoint effect in favour of the public creditor. Observe the difference to him of going into market with ninety-seven sovereigns wherewith to buy wheat at less than 40s. and going with only sixty rags to buy wheat at upwards of 80s. (the average price during the war, when he lent his money); and then bear in mind that what is clear gain to him is so much clear loss to us, the taxpayers. The difference is, in fact, so much downright plunder taken from the industrious and given to the idle and useless.
Not even at the expense of the owners of realised property are the fundholders entitled to any such advantage. They are entitled to their own (to receive it from the proper parties, the borrowers), but they have no just claim for more than their own. What was borrowed should be paid back, and no more. Peel’s measures give them thrice their own, while they work in an opposite direction against land and labour. Let there be a fair adjustment, then. Let the £800,000,000 of capital be reduced according to the change in the value of money and the fall in prices, and let the owners of every description of property be made to pay their equitable share of the adjusted burden; but on no account let another shilling of taxes be raised on account of the debt. No doubt the Chartists will have an eye to this when their day comes; and it is coming fast.
Private obligations affected by Peel’s measures should be adjusted upon the same principle as the public debt. Not to do so is to rob one class to enrich another: to persevere in such a course is to invite convulsion. Law is intended to protect property for all; not to create property for any. To pervert it from this, its legitimate function, into an instrument of rapine for the injury and ruin of those it should shield is to arm the nation against the law. This is the very effect Peel’s measures are now producing. Hence the necessity for a timely adjustment. The Act of 1819 ought to have provided against any such necessity; and when he introduced his free-trade measures in 1846, he ought to have made provision in his Acts that all public and private liabilities, involving fixed money payments, should be dischargeable only upon a reduced scale to be calculated upon the general fall of prices. Upon this principle all mortgages, leases, contracts, &c., would be open to easy readjustment, and the whole of our taxation might be reduced upon a scale corresponding with the fall of prices, without any necessity for a fresh enactment on the subject. If prices fell one-third, upon the average, all salaries, pensions, &c., would be reduced one-third; and the same in respect of public and private debts, mortgages, leases, &c. As it is, we see no remedy for the mischief but what is pointed out in our third resolution. We said so before Peel’s measure became law; and some of the ablest and most experienced men in the kingdom have since publicly expressed a similar opinion.
But enough on the provisional or palliative measures that are needful ere the four resolutions, embodied in the succeeding chapters, shall have had time to operate a full reform of our present iniquitous agrarian and commercial laws and institutions.