This is language at once fearless, but measured—cutting, but respectful, which, on such an emergency, befits a British statesman. There is no appeal to popular passions, no ascribing of unworthy motives, no attempt to evade inquiry by irony; facts, known undeniable facts, are alone appealed to. Inferences, clear, logical, convincing, are alone drawn. If such language was more frequent, especially in the House of Commons, the plague would soon be stayed, and its former prosperity would again revisit the British Empire.
In opposition to these damning facts, the whole tactics of the bullionists consist in recurring to antiquated and childish terrors. They call out "Assignats, assignats, assignats!"—they seek to alarm every holder of money by the dread of its depreciation. They affect to treat the doctrine of keeping a fair proportion between population, engagements, and currency, as a mere chimera. In the midst of the deluge, they raise the cry of fire; when wasting of famine, they hold out to us the terrors of repletion; when sinking from atrophy on the way-side, they strive to terrify us by the dangers of apoplexy. The answer to all this tissue of affectation and absurdity is so evident, that we are almost ashamed to state it. We all know the dangers of assignats; we know that they are ruinous when issued to any great extent. So also we know the dangers of apoplexy and intoxication; but we are not on that account reconciled to a regimen of famine and starvation. We know that some of the rich die of repletion, but we know that many more of the poor die of want and wretchedness. We do not want to be deluged with inconvertible paper, which has been truly described as "strength in the outset, but weakness in the end;" but neither do we desire to be starved by the periodical abstraction of that most evanescent of earthly things, a gold circulation. Having the means, from our own immense accumulated wealth, of enjoying that first of social blessings, an adequate, steady, and safe currency, we do not wish to be any longer deprived of it by the prejudices of theorists, the selfishness of capitalists, or the obstinacy of statesmen. Half our wealth, engaged in trade and manufactures, has already disappeared, under this system, in two years; we have no disposition to lose the remaining half.
The duty on wheat now is only five shillings a quarter; in February next it will fall to one shilling a quarter, and remain fixed at that amount. The importation of grain, which was felt as so dreadful a drain upon our metallic resources in 1847, may, under that system, be considered as permanent. We shall be always in the condition in which the nation is when three weeks' rain has fallen in August. Let merchants, manufacturers, holders of funded property, of railway stock, of bank stock, reflect on that circumstance, and consider what fate awaits them if the present system remains unchanged. They know that three days' rain in August lowers the public funds one, and all railway stock ten per cent. Let them reflect on their fate if, by human folly, an effect equal to that of three weeks' continuous fall of rain takes place every year. Let them observe what frightful oscillations in the price of commodities follow the establishing by law a fixed price for gold. Let them ponder on the consequences of a system which sends twelve or fifteen millions of sovereigns out of the country annually to buy grain, and contracts the paper remaining in it at the same time in the same proportion. Let them observe the effect of such a system, coinciding with a vast expenditure on domestic railways. And let them consider whether all these dreadful evils, and the periodical devastation of the country by absurd speculation and succeeding ruin, would not be effectually guarded against, and the perils of an over-issue of paper also prevented, by the simple expedient of treating gold and silver, the most easily transported and evanescent of earthly things, like any other commodity, and making paper always payable in them, but at the price they bear at the moment of presentment. That would establish a mixed circulation of the precious metals and paper, mutually convertible, and allow an increased issue of the latter to obviate all the evils flowing from the periodical abstractions of the former. To establish the circulation on a gold basis alone, in a great commercial state, is the same error as to put the food of the people in a populous community on one root or species of grain. Ireland has shown us, in the two last years, what is the consequence of the one—famine and rebellion; England, of the other—bankruptcy and Chartism.
BYRON'S ADDRESS TO THE OCEAN.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage undertakes an Idea—that of a proud spirit, born in a castle, self-driven from the bosom of home, seeking refuge, solace, renovation, from Nature, of sensibilities worn out with enjoyment. Or, he brings into play a neglected, unused sensibility—the joy of the Sublime and the Beautiful. We receive, as given, a mind gifted with extraordinary powers of will and understanding—by the favour of birth, nursed upon the heights of society—conversant with pleasure and passion; and, bearing all this constantly in mind, we must read the poem. From it large passages might be selected, in which the scorn, despite, bitterness that elsewhere break in, disfeaturing beauty and sublimity, are silent; and the passion of divine beholding stands out alone. Is this the character—or what is the character, of the celebrated concluding Address to the Ocean? Few things in modern poetry have been more universally—more indiscriminately admired; be it ours now to recite with you the famous Stanzas—and here, sitting beneath the sea-fronting porch of our Marine Villa, indulge in a confabulatory critique.
The Wanderings are at an end. The real and the imaginary pilgrim, standing together upon Mount Albano, look out upon the blue Mediterranean. He has generously, honourably, magnanimously, thrown upon the ground the checkered mantle of scorn, anger, disappointment, sorrow, and ennui, which had wrapped in disguise his fair stature and features; and he stands a restored, or at least an escaped man, gazing with eye and soul upon the beautiful and majestic sea rolling in its joy beneath his feet. He looks; and he will deliver himself up, as Nature's lone enthusiast, to the delicious, deep, dread, exulting, holy passion of—vary the word as he varies it—The Ocean.
Let us chant—with broken, though haply not unmusical voice—what may be called—the Hymn. That is a high term—let us not anticipate that it has been misapplied. Childe Harold, or Lord Byron—for it here little matters whether a grace of pleased fancy resolve the Two into One, or show the Two side by side, noble forms in brotherly reflection—here is at last the powerful but self-encumbered Spirit with whom we have journeyed so long in sunlight and in storm—delighted, sympathising, wondering at least, or confounded and angry when he will not let us wonder—here He is at last himself, in unencumbered strength, setting like the sun upon the sea he gazes on—the clouds broken through, dispersed, and vanquished, even if a half-tinge of melancholy remembrance hang in the atmosphere, radiant in majestic farewell.
"But I forget.—My pilgrim's shrine is won,
And he and I must part—so let it be,—
His task and mine alike are nearly done;
Yet once more let us look upon the sea;
The midland ocean breaks on him and me,
And from the Alban Mount we now behold
Our friend of youth, that Ocean, which when we
Beheld it last by Calpe's rock unfold
Those waves, we follow'd on till the dark Euxine roll'd