during the period included in the above table, and not a mere juggle, by transferring debt from one denomination to another, though not to the amount which these figures would indicate, is decisively proved by the following table, showing the general result of the financial operations from 1816 to 1832, when the Whigs introduced the Reform Bill: In the next eighteen years, since the Reform Bill changed the Constitution, it has been seen the debt was increased by £27,000,000. So prodigious and fatal a change in our financial system would be wholly inexplicable, considering the many able and patriotic men who, since that period, have been intrusted with its direction, if we did not recollect the vital change made since that time in the constitution of the country, and the new class which was brought up in overwhelming numbers to return representatives to the House of Commons. That class is the burgh and shopkeeping interest, with whom the main object is to buy cheap and sell dear. Not only has this principle, since that time, formed the sole regulator of Government measures in general or commercial policy, but it has operated decisively on our finances, and is the main cause to which their present hopeless condition is to be ascribed. To cheapen everything became the great object; and this was to be done, as was thought, most effectually by taking taxes off articles of consumption. Under the influence of this principle, indirect taxes to the following enormous amount have been repealed since the peace, the magnitude of which renders it noways surprising that the sinking-fund has disappeared : TABLE showing the Taxes, Direct and Indirect, Repealed and Imposed Thus the balance of indirect taxation, reduced since the peace, has been above £25,000,000-of direct, above £12,000,000 annually; and till 1842, it was £15,000,000 yearly. Had the sinking-fund been kept up at its amount as it was in 1815—that is, at £15,000,000 sterling-out of the indirect taxes, there might have been repealed £15,000,000 of direct, and £14,000,000 of indirect taxes, and still every shilling of the public debt would have been paid off by 1846. Why has this most desirable, indeed vital object for the national safety in future times, not been gained? Simply because the mania of cheapening everything has ruled the State. Successive Administrations, which have succeeded to the helm of affairs, have endeavoured to gain a fleeting popularity, by bidding against each other in the race for popularity, by the sacrifice of the best interests of their country, and the entire abandonment of all thought even of liquidating the public debt; and because Parliament-composed, so far as its majority goes since 1832, of the members for burghs-has shut its eyes entirely to the ultimate consequences of its actions, and looked only to the gratifying the buying and selling constituents of the majority of its members, by the incessant reduction of the indirect taxes, and lowering the remuneration of industry of every kind throughout the country. In truth, the chasm made in the finances of the country by this incessant, uncalled-for, and ruinous reduction of the indirect taxes, in pursuance of the mania to cheapen everything, under which the nation has been labouring during the last thirty years, has been far greater and more disastrous than the preceding figures, formidable as they are, would lead us to suppose. The taxes repealed are of course set down at the amount they were at the time of their repeal. But that is very far from what they would have produced if they had been kept up; because, in that case, of course they would have shared in the vast increase of wealth and population which has since taken place. At the time when a large part of these taxes were repealed, the British isles did not contain above from 20,000,000 to 24,000,000 of inhabitants-now they contain 29,000,000. Our exports and imports have more than doubled in amount since the income-tax was taken off in 1816. Beyond all doubt, at its original rate of ten per cent, it would now have produced, at the very least, £20,000,000 a-year. The duty on spirits, so fatally lowered in 1826, would now have produced, not £2,000,000, but £3,000,000 or £3,500,000 annually. There cannot be a shadow of doubt that the taxes, which in 1815 produced £72,000,000 a-year, would, if continued at the same rates, have been now producing fifty per cent more, or £110,000,000. There is no man in his senses who would think that the nation either could have borne, or ought to have borne, such a load of taxation, Relief, on the return of peace, was indispensable. But it is one thing to give relief in a reasonable and prudent degree; it is another, and a very VOL. III. 2 Y different thing, to throw away the public revenue with a reckless prodigality, without either principle or foresight, and for no other reason but to gratify separate and clamorous urban interests, or win a temporary popularity for Administrations which, with culpable haste, were sacrificing the lasting interests of the country. Indeed, the inevitable effect of the cheapening system, and especially of the repeal of the Corn Laws, in rendering the taxes unproductive, and payment of the interest even of the public debt ere long impossible, was distinctly foreseen and foretold, not only by ourselves in this Magazine, but by the most decided apostles of the opposite set of opinions. Hear Mr Cobbett on the subject, in vol. li. of his Register, No. 2, July 10, 1824. "The commercial world' will, I believe, find it rather difficult to persuade the landlords to modify and alter the corn laws,' much less to do away' with those laws: but what now is to become of all the pretty doctrine about the inseparable interests of manufacture and agriculture? I trust we shall hear no more of that soft nonsense. "Now, mind I do not say that the manufacturers ought not to be permitted to get food from abroad; but I say-and what man in his senses does not say, that, in whatever degree this cotton body is supplied with food from abroad, it must and will dispense with food from our own lands. "I would fain then see the two-legged animal who is quadruped enough still to contend that the interests of the landlords and those of the cottonlords are inseparable. They are directly opposed to each other; and opposed to each other they must be as long as this debt shall last. "It will be curious enough to observe how the manufacturing mind' will work upon the agricultural mind.' These two minds will now come into direct contact with each other. It will be the business of the cotton mind to convince the landlords that bringing in foreign corn will not make their English corn sell cheaper; or, failing in this, to convince them that wheat at 4s. a bushel will, in the long run,' be better for the landlords than wheat at 8s. a bushel. A very long run, I believe, indeed! In short, it is a question of rents or no rents. With the present debt and taxes, and with wheat at 4s. a bushel, there can be no rents; so that, when the cotton mind comes forward to get a repeal of the Corn Bill, it comes in fact to pray that there shall no longer be rents in England. "The cotton-lords, and indeed all the lords of the loom and anvil, are bestirring themselves, and collecting all their forces for a desperate assault upon the jolterheads (the landlords) who cry aloud for national faith. I wish them success. I will not absolutely join them; but I wish them success; because that success would destroy the whole system (the system of paper-money, national debt, and oppressive taxation) root and branch. The Corn Bill, the Small-Note Bill, the laying out of public money in Ireland, the lending of money occasionally to manufacturers and merchants, the Bank advancing money upon big estates-all these shifts and tricks just keep the thing agoing; but come a war, or repeal the Corn Bill, and you will soon see what is to become of the system. Everything seems strained to its utmost: and when that is the case, something must soon give way." The alleged advantage which the Free-Trade party oppose to the obviously calamitous effects of this incessant surrender of the public revenue, and the now admitted abandonment of all attempts to pay off the public debt, is, that commodities have been cheapened thereby, and the weight which oppressed them taken off the springs of industry. We utterly deny this advantage. What is the good of this constant cheapening, when confessedly you cannot cheapen our debts and obligations? Is it anything else but diminishing the funds from which the interest of these debts and obligations is to be discharged, and running the nation into the most imminent hazard of incurring a general bankruptcy, public and private? Do not salaries and incomes fall, from the highest to the lowest, in consequence; and if so, what good does the fall of prices do, even to the individuals who apparently profit by it? Suppose we gained our object, and rendered everything as cheap here as it is in Poland or Norway-what should we gain by it, but that we should speedily become as poor as them, and that the realised wealth of this nation, now for the most part invested in situations where its interest is paid by the industry of the people, would be lost by that industry having ceased to receive a sufficient remuneration? And is that an object for which the national security should be endangered, and the means of maintaining our independence destroyed? In truth-with the exception of manufactured articles, such as cotton and calicoes, in which the fall of prices has been prodigious, owing to the successive improvement of the machinery employed in their formation-we are at a loss to see that this immense remission of indirect taxes, which has evidently been fatal to the national finances, has been attended with the slightest benefit to the country generally. We say the country generally because there can be no doubt that it has been a very great advantage to the master-manufacturers engaged in the trades affected by the taxes, who have, in most cases, contrived to put the whole tax lost to the public into their own pockets. That is the real secret of the remission. Individual selfishness, the thirst for gain, was in most cases the moving spring. The parties interested besieged the Chancellor of the Exchequer with memorials, setting forth the hardships they sus |