Still more pressing, and to ourselves formidable, are the dangers which now threaten this country, from the consequences of that revolt against established institutions, from which the reign of universal peace was anticipated four years ago. Our position has been rendered insecure by the very effects of our former triumphs; we are threatened with perils, not so much from our enemies, as from ourselves; it is our weakness which is their strength; and we owe our present critical position infinitely more to our own blindness than to their foresight. Insensibility to future and contingent dangers has in every age been the characteristic of the English people, and is the real cause why the long wars, in which we have been engaged for the last century and a half, have been deeply chequered in the outset with disaster; and to this is to be ascribed three-fourths of the debt which now oppresses the energies and cramps the exertions of our people. But several causes, springing from the very magnitude of our former triumphs, have rendered these influences in an especial manner powerful during the last thirty years; and it is the consequence of their united influence which now renders the condition of this country so precarious.
The contractions of the currency introduced in 1819, and rendered still more stringent by the acts of 1844 and 1845, have changed the value of money fifty per cent; coupled with Free Trade in all the branches of industry, it has doubled it. In other words, it has doubled the weight of taxes, debts, and encumbrances of every description, and at the same time halved the resources of those who are to pay them. Fifty millions a-year raised for the public revenue, are as great a burden now as a hundred millions a-year were during the war; the nation, at the close of thirty-five years of unbroken peace, is in reality more heavily taxed than it was at the end of twenty years of uninterrupted hostility. The necessary consequence of this has been, that it has become impossible to maintain the national armaments on a scale at all proportionate to the national extension and necessities; and it has been exposed, on the first rupture, to the most serious dangers from the attacks of artless and contemptible enemies. Our Indian empire, numbering a hundred millions of men among its subjects, was brought to the verge of ruin by the assault of the Sikhs, who had only six millions to feed their armies; and the military strength of Great Britain is now strained to the uttermost to withstand the hostility at the Cape of Good Hope of the Caffres, who never have brought six thousand men together into the field. In proportion to the extension of our colonial empire and the necessity of increased forces to defend it, our armaments have been reduced both by sea and land. Every gleam of colonial peace has been invariably followed by profuse demands at home for a reduction of the establishments and a diminution of the national expenses; until they have been reduced to so low a point that the nation, which, during the war, had a million of men in arms, two hundred and forty ships of the line bearing the royal flag, and a hundred in commission, could not now muster thirty thousand men and ten ships of the line to guard Great Britain from invasion, London from capture, and the British Empire from destruction.