It is a poor set-off to these facts demonstrating the declining state of our foreign manufactures, to say that the exportation of iron and machinery has greatly increased during the same years, and that we have imported enormously all kinds of foreign subsistence.[10] So it has been; but what does that indicate? The first, that foreigners, under our liberal system of free trade, even in the articles vital to our manufacturing wealth, are largely importing the machinery which is to enable them to rival our staple manufacturing fabrics; and the iron rails which are to give them the means of bringing their establishments, for practical purposes, nearer each other, and compensating the immense advantages we have hitherto derived from the narrowness and compact nature of our territory, and our insular and highly favourable maritime situation. The last, which undoubtedly has risen in so short a time to a height which the most decided and gloomy Protectionist never ventured to anticipate,[11] only demonstrates that free trade is even more rapidly than was anticipated by its opponents, working out the downfal of our agricultural industry, and reducing us to the pitiable condition of the Roman empire, when, instead as of old sending supplies of provisions to the legions from Italy into distant provinces, they were entirely fed by them, and the life of the Roman people was committed to the chances of the winds and the waves.

In the sixth place, the depreciation of property and ruin to individuals which has ensued and is going on from the present crisis, is so prodigious, that the mind can scarcely apprehend it, even by the aid of the most ardent imagination. Not to mention the extreme embarrassment to merchants which must ensue from the present extravagant rate of interest and discount, and which must in most branches of commerce entirely absorb the profits of stock for this year—not to mention the vast number of the most respectable houses which have sunk under the pressure of the times—not to mention the prodigious burden imposed on landed proprietors and debtors in mortgages and bonds on personal security, by the general rise of interest to five per cent. and often above that sum, from three and a half or four per cent—let us endeavour to estimate, on something approaching to authentic data, the depreciation and destruction of property which had taken place even so early as 26th October last, when Government most properly stepped in to arrest the ruinous effects of Sir Robert Peel's currency bill of 1844.

We estimate the National Debt, funded and unfunded, in round numbers at £800,000,000; the railway property, which now produces a revenue of above £9,000,000 a-year, of which half is profit, at £100,000,000;[12] bank and other joint stock at as much; and the capital embarked in commerce and manufactures at £500,000,000. Thus, the loss on the moveable property of Great Britain by the present crisis, may be estimated as follows:—The three per cents. in August, 1845, were at £100-7/8, and for a considerable time were about 100: when Lord John Russell stepped in by his letter of 26th October, 1847, to arrest the consequences of Sir Robert Peel's bill of 1844, they were at 79; and the effect of that partial remedy, even with the bank advances for a month after at eight per cent., has been to raise them to 85. The depreciation of funded property, till the Act of 1844 was broken through, had been in two years from 100 to 80, or a fifth. Take the depreciation of all other moveable property engaged in fluctuating employments, on an average at the same amount and no more. We need not say how this understates the matter. How happy would a large part of the railway stockholders, merchants, and manufacturers of the United Kingdom be, if the depreciation of their property could truly be estimated at no larger an amount! But take it on an average as a fifth only,—the strength of the argument, as Mr Malthus said of his famous arithmetical and geometrical progression, will admit of almost any concession. The depreciation and destruction of property since 1845, will then stand thus:—

Funded property,£800,000,000
Railway property,100,000,000
Banking and other joint-stock companies,100,000,000
Capital invested in commerce and manufacture,500,000,000
——————
£ 1,500,000,000
Depreciated, a-fifth,300,000,000

Here, then, is the result of thirty years' legislation, during which time, under different administrations, some bearing the names of Tory, others of Whig, liberal principles in every department of government have been without intermission in the ascendant. The Catholic emancipators, the Negro emancipators, reciprocity advocates, reformers, self-government men, bullionists, and free-traders, have got every thing their own way. The triumph over the old system was not immediate; it took a quarter of a century to complete it: like Wellington at Waterloo, it was late in the evening before the victory was gained. But gained it has been; and that not in one branch of government, but in every branch. The ancient system has been universally changed, and to such an extent, that scarcely a vestige of it now remains in the policy of Government. So uniform has been the alteration in every thing, that one would think our modern reformers had adopted the principle of their predecessors in the days of Calvin, who stood up to pray for no other reason but because the Roman Catholics knelt down. And what have been the results? Ireland, with some millions of paupers, in a state of anarchy and crime unparalleled in modern Europe; a hundred millions of property almost destroyed in the West Indies; the slave trade, tripled in extent, and quadrupled in horror throughout the globe; an irresistible ascendency given in the Legislature to urban electors; all protection to agriculture destroyed; from ten to twelve millions of quarters of grain—a full sixth of the annual subsistence—imported in a single year; the national independence virtually destroyed, by being placed to such an extent at the mercy of foreigners, for the food of the people; foreign shipping rapidly encroaching on British, so as to render the loss of our maritime superiority, at no distant period, if the same system be continued, a matter of certainty; the practical annihilation of the sinking fund; the permanent imposition of the war income-tax, in the thirty-second year of profound peace; a falling off in the revenue at the rate of six millions, and in our exports at the rate of twelve millions a-year; the depreciation and destruction of property to the amount of three hundred millions in two years in Great Britain; and, finally, the general stoppage of railway undertakings over the whole country, and the shutting or putting on short time of half the mills in our manufacturing cities, for whose benefit all these changes were intended! We doubt if the history of the Fall of Rome exhibited such a uniform and multifarious decay in an equal period; certainly no parallel to it has yet been presented in the annals of modern Europe.

If we thought that this long and portentous catalogue of disasters was unavoidable, and could not be remedied by human wisdom, we would submit to it in silence, and we trust with resignation, as we do to the certainty of death, or the chances of plague, pestilence, or famine, arising from the dispensations of Providence, for wise and inscrutable purposes, but over which we have no control. But this is very far from being the case. We believe, as firmly as we do in our own existence, that they are entirely of our own creation,—that they are the result solely and exclusively of false principles diffused through our people, and false measures in consequence forced upon our Government; and that, though the consequences of these false principles must be long and disastrous, yet it is still possible to remedy the evil, to convert a land of mourning into a land of joy, and restore again the merry days to Old England. The retreat from the ways of error never was to nations, any more than individuals, by any other path but the path of suffering; but if the retreat is made, and the suffering borne, we trust in the good providence of God, and energy of the British character to repair all that is past.

The distress which prevails in the nation, and, most of all, in the commercial districts and cities, being universal and undeniable, the supporters of the present system, which has led to such results, are sorely puzzled how to explain so decisive and damning a practical refutation of their theories. The common theory put forth by the free traders and bullionists is, that it is the railways and Irish famine which have done it all. This is the explanation which for months has been daily advanced by the Times, and which has been formally adopted by the leaders of government in both Houses. We are a miserably poor nation; we have eaten up our resources; the strain upon our wealth has been greater than we could bear. This, of having eaten up our resources, has, in a peculiar manner, got hold of the imaginations of the able writers in the Times; and, forgetting that a great importation of food was the very thing which they themselves had held forth as the great blessing to be derived from free trade, they give the following alarming account of the food devoured by the nation in the first nine months of 1847:—

"Of live animals and provisions imported in 1847, there is an excess over last year of more than 100 per cent., of butter (duty paid) 35 per cent.; of cheese 15 per cent.; of grain and flour 300 per cent.; of coffee (duty paid) between 8 and 9 per cent.; of sugar (duty paid) 15 per cent., and of spirits (duty paid) 25 per cent. This has all been eaten and drunk. But how, it will be said, is it possible it can have been paid for? and what a splendid export trade the nation must have carried on, when all this has taken place, and only six millions of bullion have disappeared! Unfortunately, however, the explanation lies deeper. Although we have been extravagant in our living, we have starved our manufactories. We have sold our goods wherever we could find a market for them, and we have abstained from purchasing the materials out of which we may make more. We have not increased our export trade. It shows, in fact, a diminution as compared with last year; but in our avidity to consume luxuries, we have foregone, as we could not sustain the expenditure of both, keeping up the stock by which our mills and manufactories are to be fed."—Times, November 24, 1847.

So that the free traders have at last discovered that the unlimited importation of food is not, after all, so great a blessing as they had so long held forth. They have found to their cost that there is some little difference between sending thirty millions in twelve months in hard cash to America and the Continent for grain, and sending it to Kent, Yorkshire, Essex, and Scotland. They have discovered that there is such a thing as a nation increasing its imports enormously and beyond all example, and at the same time its exports declining in the same proportion, from the abstraction of the circulating medium requisite to carry on domestic fabrics. All this is what the Protectionists constantly predicted would follow the adoption of free trade principles; and they warned government in the most earnest manner two years ago, that no increase of exports, but the reverse, would follow the throwing open our ports to foreign grain; and that, unless provision were made for extending the currency when our sovereigns were sent abroad for foreign grain, general ruin would ensue. Two years ago Mr Alison observed:—

"Holding it to be clear that, under the free trade system, a very large importation of grain into these islands may be looked for now, even in ordinary seasons, and an immense one in bad harvests, it is essential that the country should look steadily in the face the constant drain upon its metallic resources which such a trade must occasion. Adverting to the disastrous effects of such an exportation of the precious metals in 1839, from a single year of such extensive importation of foreign corn, it is impossible to contemplate without the most serious alarm the conversion of that drain into a permanent burden upon the specie of the country. As the change now to be made will undoubtedly depress agricultural industry, it is devoutly to be hoped that, as some compensation, the expected increase of our manufactures for foreign markets may take place. But this extension will, of course, require a proportional augmentation of the currency to carry it on. And how is that to be provided under the metallic system, when the simultaneous import of foreign grain is every day drawing more and more of the precious metals out of the country, in exchange for food?"—(England in 1815 and 1845, third edition, Preface, page xi. published in April 1846.)