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istrations, 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 Novem

ber. 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 longprotracted 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 poorrate, both in Great Britain and Ireland; the increase in emigration; the increase of crime; the decline in railway travelling, and the ruin of agri

culture in Ireland.

With regard to the increase of the poor-rate, since free trade and the new monetary system were introduced, we have the best possible authority in the following statement in the last number of a leading journal. "It appears," says the Edinburgh Review," from Mr Commissioner Symmon's report on pauperism, that the poor-rate in England has now become heavier than it was before 1835 when the New Poor Law was introduced. It was, in 1834, £7,373,807; it was in 1848, £7,817,459. Every ninth person now in England is now a pauper: and the increase of paupers during the last two years has been double in proportion to the relative numbers of criminals."* In Ireland, above 2,000,000 persons are paupers; and the poor-rate since 1846 has risen from £260,000 a-year to £1,900,000, though it was in the first of these years only (1846) that there was any general failure of the potato crop. In Scotland the poorrate has nearly tripled in the last three years; it has risen from £185,000 a-year to £560,000. In Glasgow, the poor-rates, which anterior to 1846 were under £30,000 yearly for the city and suburbs, rose in the year 1848-9 to £200,000, and in the present year (1849-50) amount to £138,500. Nor is it wonderful that assessments have increased so prodigiously, when the augmentation of paupers has been so alarming. The following is the increase in the city of Glasgow parish, being about a

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For 1849 the numbers have not yet been made up; but that they have much exceeded 300,000 is well known, and may be judged of by the following facts.

From the official return made up at New York, and published in the New York Herald of October 10, it appears that, up to that date, there had landed, in that harbour alone, 238,487 emigrants, of whom no less than 189,800 were Irish. If to these is added the emigrants who went to Boston-where 13,000 landed in the same period, and those who have gone to Canada, where above 60,000 landed last year-it is evident that the total emigrants from the United Kingdom this year must have considerably exceeded 300,000; being probably the greatest emigration, from any country in a single year, in the whole annals of the world. It considerably exceeds the annual increment of the population of the United Kingdom, which is

* Edinburgh Review, October 1848, p. 524.

about 230,000: so that, under the
combined action of free trade and a
fettered currency, THE POPULATION OF
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND, WHICH

FOR THREE CENTURIES HAD CONTI-
NUALLY BEEN ADVANCING, HAS FOR
THE FIRST TIME DECLINED. The Free-
traders may boast of an exploit which
all the enemies of England have never
been able to effect. This has become
so notorious, that it has passed into an
ordinary newspaper paragraph; which,
without attracting the least attention
-though it is the most striking thing
that has occurred in English history
for five centuries-is now making the
round of the public prints.

It is in vain to put this dismal fact down to the account of the Irish famine. That occurred in the winter of 1846-7, three years ago, since which period we have had good harvests; notwithstanding which the emigration has, since that, been constantly about 250,000; and this year, in the midst of a fine harvest, has turned 300,000.

The increase of crime during the last three years has been equally alarming, and illustrative of the grievous distress which, for that period, has affected the industrial interests of the empire. Having, in the last Number of this magazine, fully discussed this subject, we shall only observe that, during the last three years, the increase of crime in the two islands has been nearly 50 per cent. Sir R. Peel, in spring 1846, when the railway mania was at its height, and full employment was given to railway labourers and mechanics in every part of the country, dwelt with peculiar emphasis and complacency on the diminution of commitments which appeared in the preceding year, as the most decisive proof of the beneficial effect of his measures in 1842. We hope he will dwell with equal emphasis on the increase of crime since that time, and draw from it the appropriate conclusion as to the wisdom of his subsequent measures.

The woful state of the railway interests throughout the country, and the steady and alarming decrease of the mileage profits, on an average of all the lines, is another internal symptom of the dreadful effects of the new system which, within the last three

773

years, has been introduced. Railway property, within the last three years, half, in many great lines to a third of has almost everywhere declined to a its former value. In one of the greatest all paid up, are now selling at £14, lines in the kingdom, the £50 shares, and were even lately down as low as £10. The following is taken from the Times of October 21:

ber of miles opened at Michaelmas in "The subjoined table exhibits the numtraffic per mile during the first nine seven consecutive years, and the average months in each year :

Miles opened.

1,586

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Traffic per mile.

Years. 1843

£2,330

1844

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2,500

1845

2,033

2,640

1846

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2,560

1847

3,375

2,200

1848

[merged small][ocr errors]

1,965

1,780

...

1849 The decline in the last column, from 1845 ing, and looks like a sinking to zero." to the present year, is sufficiently alarm

To what is this lamentable sinking of public investment, to be ascribed? of property, in so important a branch We are aware that much of it is owing to unproductive branch lines; but lines having, contrary to general exwhat is the main cause of these branch pectation, proved so unproductive? It is in vain to ascribe it to the cholera: that only temporarily affected parts of the kingdom; and, at any rate, it is now over, and government have very properly appointed a public thanksgiving for its terminait to the monetary crisis of 1847; that tion. It is equally in vain to ascribe is long since past: capital is overflowing, and interest in London is again down to 3 and 24 per cent. It is evidently owing to one cause, worse than plague, pestilence, and famine put together-viz. the wasting away of the internal resources of the country, under the combined operation of free trade and a restricted currency: free trade deluging us with foreign goods in every department of industry, and attempt at competition in our own. a restricted currency paralysing every only present our shoulders bare to the We are very complacent: we not own hands, lest, under the smart of the blows of the enemy, but we tie up our injury, we should be tempted to return them.

But by far the most deplorable effect of free trade and a fettered currency is to be seen in Ireland, where, for the last three years, misery unexampled and unutterable has existed. We shall mention only three facts of a general nature, descriptive of the state of that unhappy country since the simoom of the new principles blew over it, and leave our readers to judge of the state of things to which they point. In the first place it appears, from a parliamentary return, that the holders of farms who, in 1845, were 310,000 over the Emerald Isle, had sunk in 1848 to 108,000. Two hundred and two thousand cultivators of land have disappeared in three years, and with them at least half of the capital by means of which the land was made to produce anything.

In the second place, as we noticed in our last Number, the bank returns corroborate, in the most fearful manner, this alarming decrease in the agricultural capital and industry of the country. Ireland, it is well known, is almost entirely an agricultural country. Now, from the returns of the banknotes in circulation in Ireland, as made to government in terms of the act of 1845, it appears that, while in August 1846, there were £7,500,000, they had sunk, in August 1849, to £3,833,000! Othello's occupation is gone! The bank-notes can find no employment: the bankers no customers. Free trade and the bank restrictions have in three years reduced the circulation which the country could take off to half of its former amount.

In the third place, if we cast our eyes across the Atlantic, we shall see where the cultivators and agricultural capital of Ireland have gone. During the years 1847 and 1848, out of the 250,000 emigrants who annually left the British Isles, about 180,000 were from Ireland. But this year 1849, when the duties on grain became nominal in February, outdid all its predecessors in the magnitude of the stream of human beings which it caused the Emerald Isle to send across the Atlantic. It has been already mentioned that, up to October 10, 1849, 189,800 Irish emigrants had landed at New York, besides 10,000

at Boston. If to these we add the probable number to Canada, perhaps

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30,000, we shall have at least 230,000 Irish who have emigrated in one year to America and that a year of general peace, a fine harvest, reopened Continental markets, and revived manufacturing industry in the empire. And the Irish county members formed a large part of Sir R. Peel's majority which carried free trade in 1846. Truly they have smote their constituents hip and thigh.

After these facts, and the woful one, that about 2,000,000 paupers are kept alive in Ireland by a poor-rate of £1,900,000 a-year, which is crushing the little that remains of industry and cultivation in the country, it is superfluous to go into details. But the following extracts from that powerful free-trade journal, The Times, are so graphic and characteristic of the effect of its own favourite measures, that we cannot forego the satisfaction of presenting them :

ure

condition of

"The landed gentry and farmholders in this county, [Limerick,] impelled by a national calamity, now at a crisis without example in Ireland, have in contemplation a meeting to represent to his Excellency the Lord-Lieutenant the utterly prostrate all agricultural property, and the universal failof every expedient in the best farmer-destitute of capital, bereft of rural economy to sustain the Irish legitimate protection, and overwhelmed by poor-rates and taxes against the free-trade imports of the whole world. The ministerial policy of Great Britain, under sanction of a law which thousands of her loyal subjects deprecated, invites the foreign trader from all ports known to the compass to import at a nominal duty, and then suffers him to export in specie only, for his own country! What other ballast have the fleets of foreign vessels conveyed from our shore for the last three years but metallic and bank currency? With such immeasurably unequal competition at his very door, the native grower finds no market for the produce of his honest industry, unless at a price wholly incompatible with the position of a solvend man. He sells, alas! only to lose, and the selfish foreigner is sure of profit on every cheap venture; while his speculathe revenue or taxation of that state tion renders no equivalent whatever to which encourages his importations at the expense of our own independence; for the permanent independence of those kingdoms implies the prosperity of Irish produce, and its preference in the English

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