Mr Gurney, "the greatest bill-broker in the world," has emphatically declared in public, on more than one occasion, that the country cannot go on with its present expenditure; that £15,000,000 a-year, on the charges of the army and navy, is more than can possibly be afforded; and that, if a great reduction is not made, we shall become bankrupt. His remedy for this is to disband our troops, sell our ships of the line, and establish the reign of peace and bill-broking throughout the world. On the other hand, "the greatest captain in the world," the Duke of Wellington, has made the following remonstrance to several successive administrations, on the total inadequacy of our present establishments, by sea and land, to secure the national independence in the political changes which may be anticipated in the lapse of time:—
"I have in vain endeavoured to awaken the attention of different administrations to this state of things, as well known to our neighbours (rivals in power, at least former adversaries and enemies) as it is to ourselves.
We ought to be with garrisons as follows at the moment war is declared:—
| Men. | |
|---|---|
| Channel Islands (besides the militia of each, well organised, trained, and disciplined) | 10,000 |
| Plymouth | 10,000 |
| Milford Haven | 5,000 |
| Cork | 10,000 |
| Portsmouth | 10,000 |
| Dover | 10,000 |
| Sheerness, Chatham, and the Thames | 10,000 |
I suppose that one-half of the whole regular force of the country would be stationed in Ireland, which half would give the garrison for Cork. The remainder must be supplied from the half of the whole force at home, stationed in Great Britain.
The whole force employed at home in Great Britain and Ireland would not afford a sufficient number of men for the mere defence and occupation, on the breaking out of a war, of the works constructed for the defence of the dockyards and naval arsenals, without leaving a single man disposable.
The measure upon which I have earnestly entreated different administrations to decide, which is constitutional, and has been invariably adopted in time of peace for the last years, is to raise, embody, organise, and discipline the militia of the same number for each of the three kingdoms united, as during the late war. This would give an organised force amounting to about a hundred and fifty thousand men, which we might immediately set to work to discipline. This amount would enable us to establish the strength of our army. This, with an augmentation of the force of the regular army, which would cost £400,000, would put the country on its legs in respect to personal force, and I would engage for its defence, old as I am.
But as we stand now, and if it be true that the exertions of the fleet alone are not sufficient to provide for our defence, we are not safe for a week after the declaration of war."...
"I shall be deemed foolhardy in engaging for the defence of the empire with an army composed of such a force as militia. I may be so. I confess it, I should infinitely prefer, and should feel more confidence in, an army of regular troops. But I know that I shall not have these. I can have the others; and if an addition is made to the existing regular army allotted for home defence of a force which would cost £400,000 a-year, there would be a sufficient disciplined force in the field to enable him who should command it to defend the country.
This is my view of our danger and of our resources. I am aware that our magazines and arsenals were very inadequately supplied with ordnance and carriages, as well as stores of all denominations, and ammunition.
The deficiency has been occasioned in part by the sale of arms, and of various descriptions of ordnance stores, since the termination of the late war, in order to diminish the demand of supply to carry on the peace service of the ordnance, in part by the conflagration of the arsenal which occurred in the Tower some years ago, and by the difficulty under which all governments in this country labour in prevailing upon parliament, in time of peace, to take into consideration measures necessary for the safety of the country in time of war."
"I am bordering upon 77 years of age passed in honour. I hope that the Almighty may protect me from being again witness of the tragedy which I cannot persuade my contemporaries to take measures to avert."
These are strong words, as all those of the Duke of Wellington, and all other men of powerful and clear intellect, are, when they are roused and thoroughly in earnest. But when charged with such a subject, the means of defence and independence to his country, would a man of his patriotic feeling use expressions less strong, when he saw both endangered by the weakness of successive administrations, acting in obedience to the dictates of a blind and infatuated people? But if our independence has been thus menaced by the inadequacy of our defensive armaments by sea and land in time past, what is it likely to be in days to come, when the public revenue, and the resources of the kingdom, are prostrated by the combined action of a currency fettered by the acts of 1844 and 1845, and national industry overwhelmed with foreign competition under the free-trade system of 1846?
In truth, the peace congresses which now amuse the world, and give an opportunity for clever but chimerical and ignorant men to declaim upon the speedy advent of a political millennium, are nothing more than an effort, on the part of the free-trade party, to escape from the consequences of their own measures. Mr Cobden and the Free-traders of England now see as clearly as any body, that cheap prices and a large revenue, either to individuals or nations, cannot by possibility co-exist; that the £100,000,000, promised us from the abolition of the corn laws, have vanished into thin air, and that the reduction of the income of the whole classes of society under its operation will be so considerable, that it is quite impossible the national expenditure can be maintained. As the touching of the dividends is not for a moment to be thought of—as that would be bringing the tempest back with a vengeance on the moneyed class who evoked it—his only resource, to make our expenditure square with our reduced income, is in disbanding the soldiers, instituting a national guard, and selling our stores and ships of war. He is quite serious in that; and, like all other fanatics, he is not in the slightest degree influenced by the decisive refutation of his principles, which the universal breaking out of hostilities, and arming of the world, in consequence of the French Revolution of 1848, and the momentary triumph of liberal principles, has afforded. He is perfectly aware, that if industry was protected, and we had a currency equal to the wants and necessities of the nation, we might, with our extended population, raise £100,000,000 a-year, with more ease than we now do fifty millions, and thus secure the independence of the country, and bid defiance to all our enemies. But that would lower the value of money in the hands of the great capitalists, and would amount to an admission that he had been wrong; and, rather than risk that, he is content to prostrate the national defences, and hand us over, unarmed, to the tender mercies of the Chartists and Repealers at home, and the Red Republicans or Cossacks abroad.
The more intelligent of the Liberal party are now intent on a different object, but one equally descriptive of their secret sense of the failure of their grand panacea of free trade. They are full of the incalculable effects of the application of science to agriculture; expatiate largely on the analysis of soils and liquid manures, and indulge in learned disquisitions on the application of the refuse of towns and common-sewers to the improvement and fertilisation of the soil. From the Edinburgh Review, which treats its readers to a learned exposé of Liebig's principles, to Sir R. Peel's protegé, the Dean of Westminster, who boasts of having tripled the produce of his land by liquid manure, this is the grand remedy for the evils which they now see they have introduced. It is singular, if there is any truth in these discoveries, that though man has been labouring at the soil for four thousand years, and during that time had an ample supply of these fertilising streams, they have never been brought to light till free trade made them a question of life and death to a powerful party in the state. Having had ample experience of the application of these liquid manures on the largest and most favourable scale, we are able to give a decided opinion on this subject. Liquid manures are of great service in enriching meadow lands, or forcing up coarse but luxuriant crops of vegetables, such as cabbage or cauliflower, of which the leaves or stems, not the seeds or roots, form an article of food. But they do not permanently enrich the soil: their effect is over in a few weeks. A fresh inundation of the fertilising stream is then requisite, the effects of which are speedily evaporated. On this account they are wholly inapplicable to grain crops, and of very doubtful service to potatoes or turnips. In the emphatic language of farmers, they put no heart into the ground. The vegetation they force on is entirely in leaves and stems, not in seeds or roots. If they come into general use, they may increase the determination of the agricultural industry of the country to grass cultivation, and render England in modern, as Italy was in ancient times, one great sheet of pasturage; but they will never overcome the difficulties with which free trade has environed our farmers in the raising of grain crops, or enable them to compete with the harvests of the Ukraine, or the basin of the Mississippi.
In the third place—and this is perhaps a more vital consideration than any—How is the constant recurrence of monetary crises, similar to that which has left such woful desolation behind it, to be avoided upon every recurrence of a deficient harvest at home, or a straitened importation from abroad? The people of England are sensitively alive on this subject. They watch the rain in autumn with the most intense anxiety; and, if it falls a few days more than usual, the utmost alarm pervades all classes. They know well what rain in autumn portends. They see rising up, in dismal perspective before them, a great importation of grain, a vast export of sovereigns, the screw put on by the Bank of England, a contraction of credits by every bank, every man finding his creditors on his back, and one-half of his debtors bankrupt. All this they see, and see clearly; but the minds of a large portion of them are so benighted by the free-trade dogmas, that it never occurs to them that all this is the creation of their own policy, and is in no degree imputable to the laws of Providence. They think the thing is inevitable. They believe that there is a natural connexion between three weeks' rain in August and a monetary crisis, just as there is between a similar deluge and flooded meadows, or destroyed bridges. The evil, however, is entirely of human creation, and may, with absolute certainty, be avoided by human means. There is no more reason why three weeks' rain in August should produce a monetary crisis, than three weeks' rain in November. It is our ruinous monetary laws which render them cause and effect.
But assuming that the monetary laws are to continue, and free trade to be persisted in, it will become the people of this country, and especially the trading classes, to consider well the inevitable effect of such a state of things on the monetary concerns of the country, and, through them, on the solvency of every one of themselves. We have seen that the heavy rains and large importations of grain in 1839 produced the severe and long-protracted period of distress from 1839 to 1842; and that the potato failure in 1846, acting on the Bank Charter Act of 1844, occasioned the terrible catastrophe of October 1847. But what was the importation of grain, in either of these periods of distress or famine, to that which is now taking place, and has become habitual in the face of exceedingly low prices? In 1839, the whole grain of all kinds imported was 4,000,000 quarters, an amount in those days unprecedented. In 1846 and 1847, 12,000,000 quarters, under the stimulus of famine prices, was imported in fifteen months. But now, after a fine harvest, and with wheat at 41s. a quarter, we are importing annually, as our average amount, fifteen millions of quarters of foreign grain! How are the most terrible commercial disasters to be averted, if this immense amount receives any augmentation from bad seasons? Nay, how are they to be averted even in ordinary seasons, with so immense a drain on the metallic resources of the country? This is a question in which the mercantile classes are far more interested than the agricultural—for with them a monetary crisis is an affair of life and death. With landholders, cheap prices, unless very long continued, are merely an affair of temporary loss of income, because the land itself remains, and it is the value of the annual fruits only that is affected.
To compensate so many perils, past, present, and to come, have free trade and a fettered currency, since they were simultaneously brought into action in this country, afforded such a spectacle of internal prosperity and concord as to render them on the whole worth persisting in, at such hazard to our national independence, and even existence? Alas! the view is now, if possible, more alarming than the prospect of dangers to come, so much have the realised and experienced evils of the new system exceeded what the most sombre imagination, fraught with the most gloomy images, could have anticipated. Amidst the infinite variety of topics bearing on this subject, we select the five following, as bearing decisively on the subject:—The increase of the poor-rate, both in Great Britain and Ireland; the increase in emigration; the increase of crime; the decline in railway travelling, and the ruin of agriculture in Ireland.