But supposing such a decisive catastrophe were not to arise, at least for a considerable period, how are _commercial crises_ to be prevented from continually recurring under the new policy? How is the commercial interest to be preserved from ruin--from the operation of the system which itself has established? This is a point of paramount interest, as it directly affects every fortune in the kingdom, the commercial in the first instance, but also the realised and landed in the last; but, nevertheless, it seems impossible to rouse the nation to a sense of its overwhelming importance and terrible consequences. Experience has now decisively proved that the corn-growing states, upon whom we most depend for our subsistence, will not take our manufactures to any extent, though they will gladly take our sovereigns or bullion to any imaginable amount. The reason is, they are poor states, who are neither rich enough to buy, nor civilised enough to have acquired a taste for our manufactured articles, but who have an insatiable thirst for our metallic riches, the last farthing of which they will drain away, in exchange for their rude produce. The dreadful monetary crises of 1839 and 1848, it is well known, were owing to the drain upon our metallic resources, produced by the great grain importations of those years, in the latter of which above £30,000,000 of gold, probably a half of the metallic circulation, was at once sent headlong out of the country. Now, if an importation of grain to a similar amount is to become _permanent_, and an export of the precious metals to a corresponding degree to go on year after year, how, in the name of wonder, is a perpetual repetition of similar disasters to be prevented?
We could conceive, indeed, a system of paper currency which might in a great degree, if not altogether, prevent these terrible disasters. If the nation possessed a circulation of bank-notes capable of being _extended_ in proportion as the metallic circulation was withdrawn by the exchanges of the commerce in grain, as was the law during the war, the industry of the country might be vivified and sustained during the absence of the precious metals, and their want be very little, if at all, experienced. But it is well known that not only is there no provision made by law, or the policy of government, for an _extension_ of the paper circulation when the metallic currency is withdrawn, but the very reverse is done. There is a provision, and a most stringent and effectual one, made for the _contraction_ of the currency at the very moment when its expansion is most required, and when the national industry is threatened with starvation in consequence of the vast and ceaseless abstraction of the precious metals which free trade in grain necessarily establishes. When free trade is sending gold headlong out of the country, to buy food, Sir Robert Peel's law sends the bank-notes, public and private, back into the banker's coffers, and leaves the industry of the country without _either_ of its necessary supports! Beyond all question, it is the double operation of free trade in sending the sovereigns in enormous quantities out of the country, and of the monetary laws, in contracting the circulation of paper in a similar degree, and at the same time, which has done all the mischief, and produced that widespread ruin which has now overtaken nearly all the interests--but most of all the _commercial_ interests--in the state. That ruin is easily explained, when it is recollected what government has done by legislative enactment, on free-trade principles, during the last five years.