The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1847-08-10 00:00:00

another torn
exists, the int
equal-to one ounce o

Suppose that under the system which now
)f a given quantity of wheat was

insic val

or nearly

£4 of our curren

id that through indirect taxation, Or monopoly, or any

other act of our government or our own society, that given
quantity of wheat should rise in our markets to £6, let us
see how the foreigner would gain at our expense. He
would get six paper pounds, for each of which the Bank
of England would be compelled to give five dwts. of gold ;
if, therefore, he exchanged the whole of his notes for gold
'be would receive 30 dwts., or one ounce and a half of gold
for that given quantity of corn, which by the hypothesis
was only worth one ounce • it is clear, then, that by such
a trade as this we should be giving to the fore
while we only received from him four; so that, by such a

ner six,

tern of trade we are 1

Jinni foreign

transactions, and the more we extend that- commerce the
greater is our loss. (Loud cheers.) I will now point out
the causes of those panics and stagnations which are of pe
riodical recurrence, and which will continue to return in
r cycles until our monetary system is reformed.
ank of England, and all other banks of issue, being
compelled to redeem their notes in gold at a fixed price.

.re compelled to retract their issue of paper whe
'aloe of gold rises abroad above our mint price,

comes a lucrative coma
dency to export manife,

Lodity for export.
ts itself, discount

take up their_ outs.

acceptances, thro
nd the supply su

eelling the de

the. evel of I:

all price

makes bankrupts of tl

gilled to
1 their

tron,gest firms

close their mills and discharge- their workmen, which, of
coarse aggravates pauperism. Under such circumstances
distrust and suspicion universally prevail: all confidence
between man and man is lost, so that the effects of the
system are not less.disastrous than the pecuniary. (Cheersl
The sun shines as brightly as ever—our sinews have not
lost their vigour—our brains can still exercise their wonted
intelligence—in fact, nothing lias happened but the ab-
straction of a few tons of a foreign metal, of which we
have made ourselves the slaves, instead of being its
masters. (Applause.) But this abstraction deranges all
our operations, and spreads ruin and dismay among all
our marts of commerce, and thus ive are made to feel the
full extent of our infatuation. We have parted with the
instrument by which we can distribute commodities and

i the foreig

pay our t

Cheers.) We must Zet it back at any
to restore the pri-
vileged metal by lowering the price of all our goods pro-
duced by native industry ; this being done, trade tempo-

we nn

rarily revives, if that deserves the name of revival which
merely lifts us up from selling below cost price to
something that approaches to intrinsic value ; but the
instant that prices begin to r

above intrinsic value,

tion, t

foreigner

so as to embody a share of tax, ,
repeats his operation, and takes away our gold,
and kept cheap by act of parliament, having on our
hands • those commodities which are struggling to rise
in price up to the level of taxation, so that the producer
may recover from the consumer those customs and excise
which he has already advanced to the government. Thus
we are perpetually exposed to cycles of industrial prostra-
tion and commercial embarrassment, because we fabricate
our legal tender out of a commodity ever liable to be ab-
stracted by foreigners as an article of merchandize, in
which we not simply lose a commodity, but lose our
money. We have in circulation about 220 millions of
provisionary notes and bills of exchange ; these repose on
the narrow basis of an inverted pyramid of gold ; shake
the basis, the whole superstructure tumbles to the ground.
(Cheers.) In 1797, Mr. Pitt releaSed the Bank of Eng-
land from its liability to redeem its notes in gold, and
those notes were now declared to be a legal tender. To sub-
sidize our foreign alies and pay our armies in the Peninsula
we were compelled to purchase gold ; Napoleon also was
purchaser;a hence this commodity ix
it required a pound note and eight

;hilling

a guinea. This was the appreciation ac
the the depreciation of the bank note
paper, merely obeyed the law of

to 14

to purc

H. gold, r

ties rose. TI
would only purchase 13
that rate the fund-holder lent his T
but in 1819, the whole debt' of £1