The Sun.
London, England, 1844-05-02 00:00:00

..-11,1t

LONDON, THURSDAY, MAY 2, 1844.

The Lords did not sit last evening, and the only
question of importance that came before the Com-
mons was the Masters and Servants Bill. The

order of the day was to go into Committee on the

Bill, and Mr. T. DUNCOMBE, who is always at his
post, opposed it with his usual spirit. We are happy
• to state that he was successful, Sir JAMES GRAHAM
opposed the amendment, and announced his inten-
tion of voting for the Bill going into Committee.
The House; however, would not go with the Right
Hon. Gentleman. On a division there were for the
Bill 54, and against it 97, making a majority against
the Bill of 43. It is a singular fact that Sir JAMES
GRAHAM seldom carries any Bill which he supports.
The House adjourned at a Quarter past Seven.

Another meeting of the Anti-Corn-law League
took place at Covent-garden Theatre last night. Lord
KINN/MID, who was in the chair, and who expe-
rienced a most flattering reception from the audience,
• - commenced the proceedings by an intelligent and
. forcible speech, wherein he pointed out the humbug
- of the reduction-of-rent system, observing :—" If
they looked at the Morning Post and other papers,
they would see paragraphs chronicling the great
liberality of this landlord and that ; of the wonderful
example he had set of indulgence to his tenants in
having at his audit remitted them ten to twenty per
cent. on the amount of their rents. 'Why, this only
meant that the landlord could not get it." This i;
a seasonable exposure of the utter humbug of that
system of " generosity," as it is called, to-
wards their tenants, for which great Tory
landholders are so often belauded
pasins,
butthei
ar
party journals. Seldom does a week
statement appears in some paper or other, to the effect
that my Lord This or his Grace the Duke of That,
has generously, and of his own accord, remitted at
least twenty per cent. on the rents due to him, infi-
nitely to the delectation of the recipients of such
boon, who are all, of course—the statement invariably
. . adds—lost in astonishment and admiration of their
;•- donor's munificence. And yet now we learn, on the
unimpeachable authority of Lord K ENNAIRD, that the
le • whole affair is a dexterously-contrived hoax ! Gene-
rosity has nothing at all to do with the matter. The
cue is one of sheer necessity. The landlord, finding
-that notwithstanding his most strenuous exertions, he
• , cannot get the whole amount of his rent, and, pain-
, fimpressed imPreed with the disheartening fact that there
is
no
skinning a flint or drawing blood from a turnip,
resolves at length to make a virtue of necessity, and
;g• credit-to himself for remitting a portion of that
4;-44-wbich there was not the remotest possibility of
obtaining in full. Such, it •
?•:••=e •.appears is in

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many cases the secret of a Tory landlord's liberality 1
towards his tenants ! And yet these are the men
who profess to be agonised at the idea of the priva-
tions and sufferings of the factory women and chil-
dren, and are constantly declaring against the grind-
ing tyranny of the manufacturers ! Out upon such
bare-faced hypocrisy ! Nothing is so easy as this
cheap munificence which exhausts itself in mere words,
and carefully steers clear of making any substan-
tial pecuniary sacrifice. The Tory landlords are
liberal to their tenants, because they cannot help
themselves. They give only what they know they
can never get, and act upon the same discreet prin-
ciple on which the valet, in the farce of Ways and
Means, acted, who magnanimously quitted his mas-
ter's house when he found that preparations were in
progress for kicking him down stairs. In reference
to the condition of the poorer classes of the agri-
cultural population, Lord KINNAIED remarked—
" The Commissioners who were sent lately to
inquire into the state of the agricultural labouring
classes, bad furnished reports of the ignorance, desti-
tution, and immorality of these poor people in Dorset-
shire,Hants, and some other counties, that would harrow
up one's soul. He had visited the property of Mr.
BANKES, and anything more miserable than the
condition which his tenantry presented, one could not
conceive. In their detached cottages, one could see
disease brought on by want of food." After a
matter-of-fact statement like this, which Lord
EINNAIRD, it will be observed, does not give on mere
hear-say, but on his own personal knowledge, what
becomes of Mr. BANKES'S ravishing description last
year, in the House of Commons, of the flourishing
and contented condition of his tenants in the Elysium
of Dorsetshire ? In that enviable spot of the earth,
he told us, all were happy—all thriving. There,
poverty, and the numerous diseases arising from it,
were unknown. The land, like that of Canaan,
flowed with milk and honey ; rents— to quote GEORGE
ROBINS'S delightful phraseology—" were paid un-
solicited, with the punctuality of clock-work ;" and
the tenants had the invaluable privilege of " picking
up dry sticks in Mr. BANKES'S own park." Oh, if
this privilege could but be extended to St. Stephen's,
instead of being confined to the woods of Corfe Castle,
how many " dry sticks" might not be picked up
among the back seats of the Treasury Bench ! We
take for granted that we shall have no more rapturous
accounts from Mr. BANKES, of the happiness of his
Dorsetshire tenants. Lord KINNAIRD'S matter-of-
fact statement will of course indispose him from in-
dulging in any such agreeable " poetical licenses" for
the future.

We have lately perused in the columns of a Morn-
ing Contemporary an article on " the Currency as
now constituted," which so distinctly adopts, whilst
it enunciates, certain fallacies connected with the
elements of this all-important question, that we can-
not do better than deal with them at once. The ge-
neral subject will, in a few days, form the engrossing
topic of Parliament's deliberations. It may be ex-
pedient, therefore, to clear the ground ever which the
arguments on either side will be pushed, of all encum-
bering errors of principle ; and of delusive plausibi-
lities, which have nothing more to recommend them
than the authority of some great names, by whose ill
considered sanction they were originally ushered into
public notice. Against the array of great names and
clever theories the public has learned to set the prac-
tical results of a severe experience. All their respect
for the sagacity and acumen of a RICARDO does not
blind them to the stupendous blunders of his antici-
pated calculation as to the maximum ratio of decline
in prices, consequent on the establishment of the gold
standard of value by Pszu's Bill. All their reverence
for the attainments, genius, and integrity of a Ganx-
vimai, will not remove his memory beyond the im-
peachment of extreme rashness in the dogged perti-
nacity with which he insisted en the nostrum of a
gold standard of value as a panacea for all the evils,
exaggerated as well as real, of the depreciated value
of our paper money at the close of the war. The late
Lord KING scarcely imposed on one man in Britain,
beyond the immediate circle of his own political
clique, by the stand he made for his rents in gold, at
a period when the Dover and Harwich mails were con-
veying every golden guinea which could be evoked from
private hoards to these ports, there to be smuggled
out of this country to the Continent, where its market
value was so much enhanced beyond its Mint value
and denomination with us. COBBETT himself did not
give that erotchetty and unamiable peer credit for any
constitutional jealousy on behalf of the legal or golden
standard of value ; but chuckled at the success of his
g‘ noble friend's" very sordid purposes in applying the
screw so mercilessly to his tenantry. As for Mr.
HusarssoN, his character for political honesty has
been efficiently disposed of by the author of " The
Minister Mistaken." It is quite evident that when
Mr. Humssox wrote his pamphlet (destined to run
through so many editions) on the Report of the Bul-
lion Committee, he absolutely falsified, in adverting
to them, the returns and tables which had been pre-
pared by the Bank of England, to show at what pe-
riods, and under what corresponding conditions of in-
creased or diminished taxation, &c., its issues had been
expanded or contracted. But the comparison between
his assurances to the House of Commons in 1826, as
to the limited amount of even the utmost extent to
which the newly modelled tariff of import duties,
agreed to between Prussia and three or four of the
German States (a confederacy which was the proto-
type of, and finally replaced by, the Zollverein), would
affect British manufactured goods brought into
Prussia; and his own subsequent admission that, in-
stead of this utmost limit being from 15 to 20 per
cent. it reached, in some cases, between 70 and 80 per
cent.—this comparison is fatal either to his minis-
terial judgment and ability, or to his political integrity.
Either he wilfully deceived the House of Commons on
the subject, or he was the credulous dupe of the Baron
Mar:names protestations. In either case we find an
additional reason for deploring the fatuity which lis
tened to his counsels, and passed the Act of 1819,
known as " PeEa's Bill." Now the experience of
five-and-twenty years has demonstrated, first, that
the extent assumed, even by the late Mr. lIORNER
himself, for the actual depreciation of Bank of Eng-
land paper, just before the Bullion Committee last re-
ported, was fallacious, and, practically speaking, by
no means approximated to the rate which theory had
ascribed to it ; second, that the foreign exchanges
were by no means (in the practical operations of capital
on the payment and adjustment of commercial ba-
lances) so adverse as they were reported to be in the
official notations of them. The fact of this discre-
pancy, and an ingenious attempt to explain its causes,
are well illustrated in an article in the "Edinburgh
Review" for 1811, on Currency and Prices, which
has been attributed to Mr. HORNER. And yet the
continuance of these adverse exchanges was one of the
main grounds relied upon by a school of economists
who undertook to measure the ratio of depreciation
by the variation of the exchanges.
In 1819 we possessed an enormous and rapidly im-
proving foreign commerce ; money was in immense
abundance ; all the departments of domestic trade
were in full activity ; the wages of labour were ade-
quate to the subsistence of our labourers. Of the
carrying trade for other countries, which the Ameri-
cans had once so largely engrossed, we had succeeded
to an enormous portion. The facility of obtaining
advances on capital of all kinds, real or personal, was
so great that every branch of legitimate industry and
enterprise was quickened, invigorated, expanded. We
were at peace with all the world. The national debt,
in the four years since the close of the war, had been
already largely reduced. Reductions, also, of
oppressive customs duties, and other fiscal ameliora-
tions had been successively adopted. Taxes were
beginning to be removed. The public revenue was
increasing. The income of the " Excise " showed a
prodigiously increased capacity of consumption among
the
poorer and humbler classes of society. What was
wanting to the permanency and consolidation of such
a state of things, but to persevere in the slow though
certain career of improvements and guarantees on
which we had so happily thus far advanced ? Alas !
" A 1/. Bank note and ls. in silver were clearly not
equal, in the money or the foreign market, to a
golden guinea in value." What of it? Did a 1/.
Bank note and is., in silver buyless than 21 shillings'
worth of goods, here ? Was there anv difficulty in
obtaining for them manufactures which would have
sold readily for a guinea's worth of gold abroad:But,
the currency being "depreciated" so long as given
amount of Bank of England paper and silver would not
command an equivalent sum in gold, "it was ne-
cessary, above all things, to restore the ancient gold
standard of value of the country," so as to equalloe
, • •

the one description of money with the other, by
making the paper convertible into gold on demand
from its issuers. But, in the first place, it was an
historical folly to suppose that the " gold standard 01
value" WAS our " ancient standard." The experi-
ment of making Bank of England paper payable in
gold upon demand bad lasted only one hundred years,
when it was put an end to, after some failures and
many intermediate approaches to violent and abrupt
termination, by the "BANK RESTRICTION ACT" of
1797. The old money of this country was either
symbolic (intrinsically valueless, but current for a
given value, by its issue from and receipt into
the KINO's exchequer, where alone it was convertible
into silver by tale or by weight), or coined gold and
silver, to which a certain value was given by Royal
proclamation at its issue. The fancy of affixing a
certain, irrevocable value, to the ounce of gold, of
standard fineness,—leaving free to find their fluctua-
ting value with all other commodities and mer-
chandise, all other metals ; and all representatives of
capital, not having coined money, such as bills of ex-
change, Exchequer bills, and promissory notes, cir-
culating, from hand to hand ;—this fancy would have
been too wild for the gravity and sound sense of those
elder statesmen who laid broad and deep the first
foundations of British trade, opulence, and power.
But in 1819 the " gold standard of value" was set up
as it were, by acclamation.
We had now gold cheap by Act of Parliament,
though any or every other metal, chattel, merchan-
dise, money, property of any kind, should happen to
be coincidently dear. In all Europe there was pro-
bably not one-fiftieth part of the amount of our
actual currency circulation—silver and paper money,
bills, &c., of the kinds we have just referred to, circu-
lating in gold coin. In the bullion store of the Bank
of England there was not then—(if there be even now,
it is as much as there is, and that point has never
been reached till within these five or six weeks)
—so much of gold money as one-half of
the Bank of England paper at the same
time in circulation. Any fluctuation of trade
—any shock of our political relations, any un-
controllable caprice of public opinion, at home or
abroad, might, at any moment, alter the relations in
which the demands of trade, and invested and fluc-
tuating capital, stood to each other. In the same pro-
portion, the value of gold might alter and become
dearer in the " market,"—not so at the "Mint." At
the Mint, and under the statute, you must pay and
receive your gold cheap. The holders of more, in
Bank of England notes, than all the gold and
silver bullion in the Bank cellars would amount
to, might carry to the great hall in Thread-
needle-street their paper, and insist on being
paid in gold, at the standard price of 31. 17s. 10id.
per ounce. In Lombard-street, or on the Royal
Exchange, next door, gold might be fetching 51. per
ounce, at the same instant. The Bank must manage
to get, constantly, gold enough to meet all such de-
mands, at a ruinous loss of 1/. 2s. lid. per ounce on
every :sum of 31. 17s. 10id. demanded in exchange
for its own notes, or it must be bankrupt ! Such is
our boasted security against the danger of " paper-
money depreciation." What is the Bank to do ?
The moment gold begins to rise above the Mint
price, the Bank contracts its paper issues, that it
may better meet the demand for gold. Thus it pro-
ceeds to derange all the operations of commerce,
paralyse industry, cease its own usual discounts and
advances to merchants of the highest station
and probity, and produce a panic throughout
the kingdom, and involve thousands in help-
less insolvency. What panic what ruin
under the old Bank of England paper
system, ever rivalled the panics of 1825, and the
more recent ones, occasioned by the demand for
gold ? The local distress resulting from the occa-
sional failure of some worthless provincial bank, was
a drop of water to an ocean in the comparison. Be-
sides, the facilities and benefits which domestic trade
and industry derived from the institution and esta-
blishment of country banks generally, far outweighed
any such partial and occasional mischiefs. Why did
not the Legislature stop at making all paper issues
convertible into gold at the market value—not at a
pm-concerted Mint price, which can have no
more necessary relation to what the fluctua-
tions we speak of may render, from time
to time, its absolute intrinsic value, than if this
value were taken in 1844 from that applied by DARIUS
to his lost coinage of Persian daricks. By fixing
the price of gold, more especially, at the lowest rate
deducible from the averages of a long series of years,
during which our trade and commerce, our wealth
and resources, their development and their application
were all in mere infancy compared to their present
gigantic growth, you have enhanced and enlarged the
powers of that possible external pressure, which a
rise in bullion will always—and must one day, fatally
—bring to bear upon the Bank of England. " The
most serious of the imputations against the currency
as now constituted," says our Contemporary, "is
liability to over-issue, by which is of course meant,
issue in such abundance as to depreciate the currency,
or, what is the same thing, to raise general prices."
Now the most serious of the imputations in question
is not, necessarily, the liability to over-issue. So far
from it, the peril is at once greater and more frequent
of under issue. The false position of the Bank of
England, its perpetual insecurity, from liabilities to
pay in gold, to an extent which it is PHYSICALLY IM-
POSSIBLE for the Bank to meet, should 20,000,0001.,
for example, of
:its own notes be ever presented for
conversion in the terms of PEEL'S " folly" of 1829
and the natural proneness of the Bank to contract its
issues, therefore, and ALWAYS at the wrong time—
that is to say, when accredited paper of any kind is
most needed, and in the largest quantity, to allay
commercial panic (the square of whose expansion
may justly be said to be in the ratio of its duration)
—these are the gravest charges to be urged against
our present currency. As to the effect of abundant
paper issues in " raising prices," we have so recently
shown the advantage to the whole community of
prices that will represent the taxation sanctioned by
our industrial labour in, or pending, the production of
its commodities ; and the impossibility of foreign
competitors deriving any advantage over our manu-
facturers from such prices, seeing that as they would
be paid in paper they will obtain gold for it on such
terms only, as shall equate their returns (through the
higher price of bullion) to those derived by our manu-
facturers, that we do not feel warranted in pressing
the point further at present on our readers. Besides,
this is the fifth and the last of the propositions which
we have pledged ourselves to demonstrate, seriatim,
in a future article.

We have accounts from Madrid to the 24th ult.,
and are glad to find that the editors of some Liberal,
or rather Opposition journals, begin to show some
feelings of compunction for their long silence, and the
enslaved state of their country. Two suppressed
journals, the Tiempo and the Eco del Comercio, had
re-appeared, and the resurrection of a third was ex-
pected in a few days. The Tiempo denounces, with
national spirit, the influence of France over Spain.
The Three per Cents. were done at 36t for cash,
and 37i at sixty days; and the Five per Cents at 21i
for cash, and 22i at sixty days.

The discussion in the French Chamber of Depu-
ties, on the election of M. C. LAFFITTE, continued dur-
ing the entire sitting on Monday, and did not close
till past six o'clock. The debate was extremely
noisy and disorderly, and the opposition made to the
return arose more from personal pique against M.
LAFFITTE than fromi any conviction that he had been
guilty of corrupt conduct. Though the Government
supported the motion for confirming the election, it
was lost by a majority of 16; there being
for the motion 167, and against it, 183. The
electors, from all accoounts, are as obthtinate
as the Chamber, and are determined to return
no other member. The Conservative journals
denounce the conduct of the Opposition, and describe
it as an unwarrantable attack on the rights of electors,
" Let the Left triumph," says the Journal des Debats,
and thank the Deputies of the majority, who sup-
ported them. Thus, M. CHARLES LAFFITTE is de-
prived of his right of representing an arrondisse-
ment, by which he has been three times constitu-
tionally elected. The electors of Louviers are again
stripped of the right which they had to be repre-
sented by the man who possessed their esteem and
confidence. M. CHARLES LAFFITTE is a Conservative
—that is his true crime—aggravated by the name
that he bears. If M. CHARLES LAFFITTE had made
a profe!sion of faith against the right of search, or
the fortifications of Paris, then, indeed, all scruples
would have been at end, and all the heroin con-