1. They first, by the Acts of 1844 and 1845, restricted the paper circulation of the whole empire, including Ireland, to £32,000,000 in round numbers. For every note issued, either by the Bank of England or private banks, above that sum, they required these establishments to have sovereigns in their coffers.
2. Having thus restricted the currency, by which the industry of the country was to be paid and supplied, to an amount barely sufficient for its _ordinary_ wants, they next proceeded to encourage to the greatest degree railway speculation, and pass bills through parliament requiring an _extraordinary_ expenditure, in the next four years, of £333,000,000 sterling.
3. Having thus contracted the currency of the nation, and doubled its work, they next proceeded to introduce, in 1846 and the two following years, the free-trade system, under the operation of which our specie was sent out of the country in enormous quantities, in exchange for food, and by the operation of the law the paper proportionally contracted.[20]
4. When this extraordinary system of augmenting the work of the people, at the time the currency which was to sustain it was withdrawn, had produced its natural and unavoidable effects, and landed the nation, in October 1847, in such a state of embarrassment as rendered a suspension of the law unavoidable, and induced a commercial crisis of unexampled severity and duration, the authors of the monetary measures still clung to them as the sheet-anchor of the state, and still upheld them, although it is as certain as any proposition in Euclid, that, combined with a free trade in grain, they _must_ produce a constant succession of similar catastrophes, until the nation, like a patient exhausted by repeated shocks of apoplexy, perishes under their effects.
It may be doubted whether the annals of the world can produce another example of insane and suicidal policy on so great a scale as has been exhibited by the government of England of late years, in its West India measures, and the _simultaneous_ establishment of free trade and fettered currency, and a railway mania, in the heart of the empire.
The effect of these measures upon the internal state of the empire has been beyond all measure dreadful, and has far exceeded the worst predictions of the protectionists upon their inevitable effect. Proofs on this subject crowd in on every side, and all entirely corroborative of the prophecies of the protectionists, and subversive of all the prognostics of the free-traders. It was confidently asserted by them that their system would immensely increase our foreign trade, because it would enrich the foreign agriculturists from whom we purchased grain, and who would take our manufactures in exchange; and what has been the result, after free-trade principles have been in full operation for three years? Why, they have stood thus:--