While this deplorable prostration of the interests of industry in all its manufacturing branches has taken place, no corresponding general decline in prices has occurred. The producer has in too many cases been ruined, but the consumers have not as yet at least been benefited. In some branches of manufacture, indeed, a most frightful depreciation of value has taken place. Silks, muslins, and ladies' dresses are now selling for half of what they were a year and a half ago. But that is the effect of the French revolution, which has thrown such an immense quantity of articles of this description into the British market, and of the unparalleled number of failures amongst ourselves, which have forced such prodigious masses of stock, belonging to sequestered estates, to sale. These bankruptcies, and the ruinous contraction of the currency which has occasioned them, afford too satisfactory an explanation of the depressed prices in most of the staple articles of British manufacture. But in those articles which are not so dependent on the maintenance of commercial credit, and in which the good effects of free-trade might have been expected to appear, unmitigated by its attendant disasters, no diminution of price is perceptible.
The last harvest was so fine, that a public thanksgiving was offered for the blessing; and it came on the back of the importation of £31,000,000 worth of foreign grain, or above 12,000,000 quarters in the preceding fifteen months: but the price of wheat is still 51s. a quarter, and that of oats and barley yet higher in proportion. Oxen and sheep, as well as all kinds of provisions, have been imported to an enormous extent during last year;[2] so great, indeed, as to make the able writers in the Times apprehend that they had drained away the whole currency of the country in exchange; but butcher meat is still 7d. a pound. The West Indies are irrecoverably and finally ruined, but we are paying 5d. and 6d. a pound for our slave-grown Cuba and Brazil sugar. The Banker's Circular of May 2, 1848, asks whether there was ever heard of before a monetary crisis which "had lasted a year?" but no man, during that year of fine harvest, general peace, and universal suffering, has found that his household expenses have experienced the least diminution from what they were during the previous years of protected industry, wide-spread contentment, and unbroken prosperity. Free-trade is evidently driving some of the staple branches of British industry out of the field; one is expiring in the West Indies, another languishing in Manchester, a third tottering in Glasgow; and the diminution of home production keeping pace with the increase of foreign supply, prices remain what they were—domestic is superseded by foreign industry; and we shall have the satisfaction of finding that we have ruined many staple branches of our own manufacture without benefiting any class of our people.
It must be evident to every rational observer that this extraordinary and universal depression must have been owing to some cause within the control of the government of this country, and that neither external calamities, nor the inclemencies of nature have had any material share in producing it. Within the short period of three years not only was there no deficiency of employment in any part of the empire, but labour bore a high, in general an extravagantly high price in every part of the empire. Sir R. Peel in an especial manner dwelt on this general flood of prosperity which had set in upon the country in spring 1845, and ascribed it, and the diminution of crime with which it was accompanied, to the measures for liberating commerce from fiscal restraint, which he had introduced on his first coming into power. Since that time no external disaster or warfare has arisen, till the French Revolution broke out in February last, to account for the stoppage of employment, or the general misery into which the lower classes have fallen. We were at peace with all the world: our exports in the year 1845 had reached the unprecedented amount, including the colonial productions, of £150,000,000;[3] and railways, penetrating the country in all directions, gave an extraordinary degree of employment to the working classes. In autumn 1846, it is true, Ireland and the West Highlands of Scotland were visited by a failure, amounting in many places to a total ruin, of the potato crop, which is said to have destroyed agricultural produce to the amount of £15,000,000 sterling. But though this great defalcation was the source of extreme distress to the cultivators who suffered by it, and to a certain degree diminished the general supplies of the empire, yet it could not be considered as the cause, by itself, of the wide-spread ruin which has since overtaken every interest in the empire. The agricultural productions of Great Britain are estimated by statistical writers at above £300,000,000 sterling annually, and the manufacturing and mining certainly exceed £200,000,000.[4] What is a failure of £15,000,000 of potatoes in such a mass? Such as it was, the gap was more than supplied by the importation, in a year after it occurred, of £31,000,000, or double the amount in value, of foreign grain. The harvest of 1847 was so fine that a solemn thanksgiving was, with the general approbation of the nation, offered to Almighty God for its blessings. Prices have since been not excessive, wheat being at an average about 51s. a quarter—yet still, in May 1848, we are in universal distress; and the want of employment is felt much more strongly by the manufacturing classes, who have been affected by no disaster whatever, than the agricultural, who have suffered one which has now passed away.
While these are the social evils which the working classes every where experience, and which have alone rendered the Chartist movement general or serious in the country, the great complaint, in a political point, which they every where make is, that the legislature and the government are alike indifferent to their representations; that they turn a deaf ear to their complaints, show themselves insensible, to their tales of woe, and refuse even to give that moderate relief to them which is easily within their power, which a paternal government is bound to extend to its distressed subjects, and which, in former days, under Tory administrations, was never withheld from the people, when suffering under dispensations not approaching to the present in duration or intensity. To give an idea of the feeling now universal in the commercial and manufacturing districts, we subjoin an extract from a journal conducted with much ability, the Daily Mail of Glasgow.
"The household suffrage movement originates in a deep-seated conviction that the present legislature works ill. There are practical measures offered for its acceptance, which it rejects; and yet the feeling of the country is in their favour. Means of employing the idle are suggested; but by the government and by the parliament they are heedlessly neglected. Some crotchet in political economy is introduced into a plain matter of accounting; and meanwhile the people starve, because their sustenance, in the way proposed, is inconsistent with something that somebody has written in a book. There is an obvious insufficiency of food, of employment, and of investment in the country, while land languishes for lack of tillage; and when the plain remedy for these great deficiencies is pressed, there arises the ghost of long-past folly, waving its parchment before the legislature, and so the living are starved, in strict accordance not with the meaning but with the mistake of the dead. Free-trade is proclaimed to be the rule of our political practice by the same men who enact and maintain laws to fetter and reduce the circulation of the country, which is the life of its trade. We hear of free-trade with foreign countries, in which duties equal to twenty, thirty, and forty per cent are charged upon our products, although the existence of freedom of trade under these circumstances is absolutely impossible.
"The nation holds colonies in all quarters of the world, purchased and maintained at a costly rate, embracing every characteristic of soil and climate on the earth, competent to provide homes and sustenance for nearly the whole population of the world; and the legislature voluntarily casts away all interest to be derived from their progress, except its cost. The national affairs are managed on some kind of rule altogether different from any thing that a prudent man would adopt in the guidance of his private business; and so employment becomes scarce, and food dear together; while the natural and necessary results are, popular irritation, and a desire for change, which have led to the associations for extending the suffrage, now general throughout the great cities of the empire."—Glasgow Daily Mail, May 2, 1848.
There is too much foundation, all must admit, for these complaints. On occasion of the dreadful monetary crisis of October 1847, when ministers were compelled to break through the Bank Charter Act, and nearly all railway labour and mercantile industry in the country was suspended from the impossibility of finding funds to carry them on, the government were besieged with the most earnest memorials from the chambers of commerce in nearly all the commercial cities of the empire, and especially London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Edinburgh, pointing out the ruinous effects of the Bank Restriction Act of 1844; but still they did nothing. They contented themselves with appointing a committee, in which the bullionists were understood to have the majority, in parliament, which, after sitting long, and examining a host of witnesses, and burying the question under heaps of blue folios, will probably end by reporting a year hence in favour of the present system. The most vigorous remonstrances have been made by the same commercial bodies against the threatened abrogation of the Navigation Laws; but that has not in the slightest degree shaken the avowed determination of government, to carry the principle of free-trade without limitation into that vital branch of our national industry.
The West India interest demonstrated in a manner "luce meridiana clarius," that the equalisation of the duties of foreign slave-grown to home free-labour-raised sugar, would prove utter ruin to our West India colonies, and reinstate in frightful activity the infernal traffic of the slave-trade; but this did not produce the slightest impression on government, and they without hesitation consigned these noble colonies to destruction, and restored the slave-trade throughout the globe, rather than abate one iota of the dogmas of free-trade, or raise sugar a penny a-pound.[5] All the great cities of the empire have sent deputations or memorials to government, beseeching in the most earnest manner a grant of exchequer bills, or the aid of treasury credit in some way, to set agoing the unfinished lines of railways, and enable them to find a certain amount of labour for the unemployed; but they have every where, met with a decided refusal. We must have free-trade in every thing, in pauperism, typhus fever, and insurrection, as well as in corn, cotton, or sugar. Laissez faire is the universal system: all government has to do is to hinder the competitors coming to blows. Every thing must find its level, though that level to one-half of the community is the bottom of the cellar. One thing only is to be protected, and that is gold; one class only is to be saved from competition, and that class is the great capitalists.
This obstinate resistance of government to the wishes, and declared insensibility to the wants and necessities of the country, is the more remarkable that it exhibits so striking a contrast to the paternal spirit by which government was formerly actuated. Suffering, never indeed approaching in extent and intensity to that which now afflicts the nation, but still sufficiently distressing, has been often experienced in former times; but on none of these did the government hesitate to come forward with a large grant, founded on the public credit, to alleviate the general calamity, and always with the very best effects. In 1793, in consequence of the breaking out of the war, and the general hoarding which took place in France during the terrors of the Revolution, a great export of gold from the British islands to the Continent took place; but Mr Pitt at once came forward with a grant of £5,000,000 to aid the commercial interest; and so rapidly did this well-timed advance restore credit, that a small part only of this large sum was taken up, and very little of it was lost to the nation. In February 1797, a similar cause produced that great run on the bank which brought that establishment to the verge of ruin; but the same minister instantly introduced the suspension of cash payments, which at once restored credit, revived industry, and carried the nation in a triumphant manner through all the dangers and crises of the war. In 1799 and 1800, two successive bad harvests brought the nation to the verge of starvation; but government interposed by various sumptuary laws regarding food, stopped distillation from grain, and themselves imported immense quantities of Indian corn for the use of the people. In 1811, a similar calamity ensued from the effects of Napoleon's continental blockade, and the American Non-intercourse Act; but government again interposed with an issue of exchequer bills, and confidence was restored, and with it industry and commerce revived.
In 1826 very great depression existed in all branches of industry, in consequence of the dreadful monetary crisis of December 1825; but government stopped the crash, as Lord Ashburton has told us, by issuing £2,000,000 of old and forgotten notes from the Bank of England, and then alleviated the distress by a copious issue of exchequer bills to aid the commercial interest, which soon brought the nation out of its difficulties. But since the government has been popularised by the revolution of 1832, nothing of the kind has been done. The long-protracted distress from 1838 to 1841, and the dreadful suffering of 1847-8, have been alike unable to extort for British suffering one farthing in aid of the national industry from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The principle laissez faire has prevailed alike over the strongest claims of justice and the most piteous tales of suffering. Government seems resolved that the nation shall drain the lees of free-trade to the dregs, and taste it in all its bitterness. It is no consolation to suffering British industry to see that £10,000,000 was in one year voted to suffering Irish idleness, and £20,000,000 in another to the grand step in West Indian ruin. The people see that the first was yielded to terror, the last to fanaticism; and the melancholy conviction has forced itself on every mind that government now yield to nothing but the strongest pressure from without; and that the doors of the Treasury will be opened only to the fierce demand of threatened high treason, or the reverberated echoes of wide-spread delusion.
Ministers were aware of all this; and they knew also that, on the first declaration of war with France or any foreign power, they would at once raise a loan or issue exchequer bills to the extent of at least £20,000,000 sterling. Here is an enemy worse than the French, or the French and the Repealers united—want, fever, famine, disaffection, despair, actually within our bosom, and consuming the very vitals of the state! A word from the Chancellor of the Exchequer would at once arrest the misery, dispel the sedition, restore bread to millions, revive loyalty in a wasted and perishing state.[6] Why, then, is it not instantly done? why does not government eagerly seize so glorious an opportunity of healing the wounds of the suffering people, and extinguishing, by deeds of beneficence, the demons of discord and disaffection in the realm? Because it would interfere with a principle; it would intercept the free employment of wealth; it might alarm capitalists, lower the value of Exchequer bills, and for a week or two depress the funds a-half, or perhaps one per cent. It would be a substantial extension of the currency, and that would imply an avowal that it had formerly been unduly contracted; it might be quoted against ministers as a tardy and reluctant admission of the error of their former monetary policy in the parliamentary committee, or in the House of Commons! It is for such wretched considerations as these that relief is refused, and want, wretchedness, and treason prolonged throughout the kingdom. Were the subject not so serious, and even terrible in all its bearings, their conduct would remind us of the well-known reasons assigned by Dr Sangrado to Gil Blas, for continuing, to the evident destruction of his patients, the system of hot water and bleeding.