The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1847-08-03 00:00:00

d that from the commencement

111 S 10:

own me

slightest chance
We doubt much

love 1000 votes
being able tc

he support of the Roman
hose views his own too nearly approach
told by the illercuru that, but

poll, that party, .._ ..te effort to keep
y at all hazards, would have polled for

for his sorry

on on tt

Sir D

For the part which we ourselves have taken in
this contest, we have no apologies to make. It
may be said that, along with the candidate of our
choice, we coupled a member of a party against
many of whose acts we have been found in active
hostility. We did so ; and we explained our rea-
sons, and still maintain them to be sound. We
had offered to us Sir Digby Mackworth and a Free
Trade Conservative, a Liberal" or a Tractarian
; his colleague. We preferred the Conservative
ree Trader to either of the two left us for choice.
suit of the election has seated a Whig,
ith a Conservative Free Trader as his colleague,
and unseated Sir Digby Mackworth, with whom
our feelings were most strongly bound up, with
the friends of Lord John Manners, we repeat, the
blame of the issue rests.

We observe that v
rv,—his lordship's

accused by a contempo-

in the course

he offensiveness of which

presented him, by quoting and commenting upon
his " boyish opinions." Certainly, there are some
persons into whose life the state of boyhood extends
very far ; and his lordship must be one of those

The c

arliest of the opinions in question
were promulgated by his lordship in 1843, and we
presume he was not quite a boy then, in the ordi-
nary sense of the term. Ample opportunity, how-
ver, has been offered to his lordship to repudiate
q.nd to tell us what are the virile
_ +lpir stead. If

those opinions,

he has not seized upon the opportunity, the blame
is none of ours. Our contemporary seems very
sore at beingassured, by the fact of his candidate be-
ing at the foot of the poll, how small an amount of
influence he wields in the town; and we do not,
therefore, wonder at his scolding, or the very lame
charges which he rakes up to fling at other parties.

WE have before us two remarkable and valuable
pamphlets upon that most important subject, the
currency question ;—remarkable as pointing out
the past operation of our present system upon the
industry and the social condition of the country,
and most valuable as containing, in addition to the
views of the writer, a mass of statistical data, which
to our minds clearly prove the correctness of those
iews. The first of these in the order of publica-
ntly—for although both the pamphlets
the present is the fourth
d enlarged—is entitled "England

tion, appa

bear the imprint 184

in 1815 and l&
or a Sufficient

Tonetary Famine of 1847 :
al a Contracted Currency. By

5, and th

Archibald Alison, F.R.S.E., Author of the History
of Europe, during the French Revolution." The
second is entitled Free Trade and a Fettered
Currency," by the same distinguished Author. In
endeavouring to lay before our readers the sub-
stance of Mr. Alison's views, we shall deal first
with the pamphlet " England in 1815 and 1845."
Mr. Alison traces the progress of the Nation
from 1793, which commenced with an amount of
Commercial distress, at that time unparalelled by
'any previous distress either in intensity or dura-
tion, which was only relieved by an extensive loan
by government to the trading classes, and which
terminated in the dreadful monetary crisis and run
upon the bank, and mutiny in the Fleet in 1797,
which brought the nation to the brink of ruin, and
forced upon the government the necessity of sus-
pending cash payments. During these four year's
our external position had been equally disastrous,
defeat, with one exception—the Victory of Howe

meeting us on every side. The history of the next
eighteen years of the war, from 1897 to 1815, is
well known, Victory crowned our arms in every
contest by sea and land. The despot of Europe
was hurled to the dust ; and from the position of
the most distracted and depressed of nations Great
Britain rose to a pinacle of glory and power, which
she had never before occupied. Her colours en-
circled the globe. Her flag was paramount in every
sea. Nor had her industrial and social progress
failed to keep pace with her naval and military
progress. Her agriculture, commerce and manu-
factures had increased amazingly in extent and
prosperity; her exports, imports and tonnage had
doubled since the war began; and notwithstand-
ing some temporary distress experienced by the
operative population, especially in the years 1810
and 1811, their average condition had been one of
prosperity. Her yearly revenue from taxation had
risen from £21,000,000, in 1796, to £72,000,000 in
1815 ; and in 1814 and 1815 the nation had borne,
without exhausting either our capital or resources,
the enormous drain of £117,000,000 of taxation in
each year. The comparative lightness with which
this burthen was felt is proved by the fact that the
loan of 1844 was raised at £4 11s. 6d. per cent., or
lower than at the commencement of the war, although

that loan was to the amount Of £35,000,000 and
the population was only eighteen millions, or just
two thirds of what it is now.

The arrival of peace, and the sudden contraction
of the war expenditure, necessarily caused great
temporary distress, which was aggravated by the
disbanding of above 300,000 men, who were thus
thrown upon the country without means or employ-
ment, and by the effects of a commercial crisis,
which took place especially in our e.‘stern ports,
owing to the inability of the impoverished Euro-
pean states, to purchase the large quantity of goods
which we poured into their markets. Yet upon
the whole, the years from 1815 to 1817 were pros-
perous, notwithstanding two bad harvests occurring
in succession; and in proof of this, although the
income-tax was repealed during the period, along
with the war malt taxes, producing together above
£18,000,000 a year, the annual surplus applied to
the reduction of the debt amounted to £10,000,000,

exclusive of sums applied to the redemption of
exchequer bills and other financial operations.
In 1819, it is well known that Sir Robert Peel's
Currency Bill became the law of the land ; and
from that time to 1844, Mr. Alison remarks " The
empire exhibited the most extraordinary spectacle
which the world has ever witnessed." We
may sum it up briefly as follows :—Our popula-
tion had increased from 20,600,000 in 1819, to
28_000.000 in I

ports in the same

period from £30,000,000 to £70,000,000; our ex-
ports from £44,000,000 to £130,000,000 ; and our
shipping from 2,350,000 tons to 3,900,000 tons.
Our agriculture had similarly progressed, whilst
our importations had steadily declined from the
commencement of the century, until, previous to
the six successive bad seasons commencing in 1836,
it had sunk to 400,000 quarters on the average of
the five preceding years, being scarcely one-hun-
dred-and-twentieth part of the consumption of men
and animals, which Mr. Alison rates at above
60,000,000 quarters. And he adds—
" What is most extradrdinary of all, the returns of the
income tax, when laid on even in the year 1842, a period
of severe and unprecedented commercial depression,
proved the existence, in Great Britain alone, of
£200,000,000 of annual income of persons enjoying £l5O
per annum each • of which immense sum about
£150,000,000 was from the fruits of realised capital, either
in land or other desirable investment. It is probable that
such an accumulation of wealth never existed before in any
single state, not even in Rome in the state of its highest
splendour."

Yet never was a period in which financial em-
barrassment was more felt by the Government and
more sufferings by the people ; and this increased
until the nation was extricated only by the re-
imposition, during the thirtieth year of peace, of the
War Income-Tax. The sinking fund had also been
abandoned during the period ; and at length, in six
years of peace, we had added £11,000,000 sterling
to the national debt. Mr. Alison sums up this por-
tion of his remarks by the following statement :

" The nation, during the latter years of the war, pros-
pered, and experienced general well being under an
annual taxation of £72,000,000, drawn from eighteen
millions of souls : in the latter years of the peace, it has
with the utmost difficulty drawn £50,000,000, from a