The Sun.
London, England, 1859-04-12 00:00:00

producer was enabled to recover from the consumer
his fair amount of taxation. The working man's
welfare is t ,ound up with that of the producer ;
and, as every producer produces much more than
he consumes; , it is the producer's interest to obtain
a good pric( for his products. If a man produce
100 articles, .and consume 10, a fall in price on each
article of 0; tie shilling causes him to lose £5
and to save 1C s. In a highly-taxed country a low
range of prices is, therefore, injurious to the pro-
ducer and to th e working men whom he employs.
It is even more injurious to the working man than
to the master producer. For with low, unremu-
nerative prices th e wages of the working men are
more than proportionably reduced, and thus the
' tax which ought to fall on the consumer is ground
out of the working man. The paper money
system, which prevailed from 1797 to 1815, was
unaccompanied by the viollent expansions and con-
• tractions of the present system. The rate of dis-
count was, therefore, much more uniform, and the
; monster evil of panics was unknown.

PEEL knew that it was impossible to return to
the obsolete and barbarous system of a metallic
currency. But in his Bill of 1819 he went as far
as he dared in this direction. He crippled and
fettered the enlightened and beneficial paper money
system, which he could not destroy. What have
been the results ? We challenge the Tines to prove
that the results have not been most disastrous. In
1816 the proposition made by the Bank to return to
cash payments,by contracting its issues, produced dis-
tress, which Mr. TIERNEY said " had never been
equalled. in this country since the Norman con-
quest." In 1819, after the passing of PEEL'S Bill,
monstrous distress and ruin ensued. In 1825 came the
panic which swept away scores of banks and thou-
sands 'of merchants, and filled the country with
pauperised operatives. The distress which con-
tinued through the succeeding years mainly led to
the passing of the Reform Bill. Then in 1837 and
1838 came great monetary pressures, with their
attendant evils. These evils PEEL admitted when
he introduced his bill in 1844 to prevent them. In
1847 the bill was put on its trial, and proved a
decided and contemptible failure. The country
paid the price of the blundering statesmanship of
PEEL and OVERSTONE and the panic mongers. But
a most unexpected ally came to the rescue of the
bullionists. Gold was discovered in immense and un-
precedented quantities in California and Australia.
Now then, said the Peelites, there is an end of the
paper money system. Then in 1857 comes a mone-
tary crisis, if possible, worse than the former ones ;
and again is the ridiculous and impracticable Bank
Charter Act abrogated by the Minister's letter.
We are now only slowly emerging from the evil
consequences of the last panic, and the financial
difficulties which are pressing us on every side
must be attributed very considerably to the same

cause.
Now, it must be remembered, that during the
last forty years we have enjoyed an unusual pro-
portion of years of peace, that science has effected
infinitely more for the progress and prosperity of
the nation than ever occurred in a similar period,
that steam navigation has assisted to develop the
gigantic resources of our colonial possessions,
and railways at home have given an impetus
to trade of which our forefathers could
not have .formed the slightest conception.
Remembering these things, we say that there must
have been some extraordinary and fatal blunder in
modern statesmanship to counteract all these causes
of general and permanent prosperity. We agree
entirely with Sir A. ALISON that the currency
system is principally to blame for the distress,
ruin, crime, pauperism, and forced emigration, which
we have witnessed so often during the past forty
years. And we say, moreover, that the gleams of
prosperity which we have enjoyed are to be attri-
buted principally to PITT'S paper-money system,
which PEEL could not entirely subvert, though he
did his best to do so.
We think Sir ARCHIBALD quite right in affirm-
ing that the future destiny of England depends on
the reformation of the existing most pernicious
system, and we hold his arguments to be as much
sounder than those of that " particular luminary,"
the Times' writer, as the instincts and aspirations
of the distinguished historian of modern Europe are
nobler than those of the usurer and the "hard

calculator."
We will add a few words relative to the Western
Bank of Scotland affair. The Times abuses Sir A.
ALIsON as upholding a system of fraudulent bank-
ing. He does nothing of the kind. But he says,
very justly, that the Bank Charter Act, which
obliges the Bank of England, when gold flows into
the country,.to make money so plentiful that it be-
comes a " drug" in the market, and discounts
decline to 1 and 2 per cent., does in effect tempt
men to speculation and foster overtrading and bad
banking. We have seen this in the gambling in
American mines, in the railway mania, and recently
in the proceedings of such institutions as the
British Bank of London, and the Western Bank of
Scotland. The great primary cause of the evil has
been, in all these instances, the same, and that
cause is the unwise, unjust, and ruinous monetary
system established by PEEL'S Acts of 1819 and
1844.