Litchfield enquirer., 1858-10-07
A GLOOMY PROSPECT.
From the N. Y. Tribune l

Of all the furnaces in the Union, one half at least must be closed-the remainder being oulys partially employed. So, too, is it in the rolling productive power being now in action. In the coal region, as we learu, the distress among the ing people is Likely to be greater than has ever yet been known. Last winter, they had the little savings of the Summer, but this season they have been bit half employed. Our rail- roads are likely soon to pass iuto the hands d the bondholdcrs-the original proprietors being utterly extngushed. Our farmers have little wheat, scarcely any oats and but >lnal! supplies of corn. Heavily ill debt, with enormous in- tereat 10 pay, their farms must pass through the sher,a. s hauds. Our shipping interest is now, of all, the most ruinously depressed and yet it is likely to be still worse-the carriage of really valuable commodities tending to pass entirely into the hands of owners of foreign ships. As regards our factories and their owucrs generally, the following paragraph from one of our exchanges exhibits, as we thlnk, the true position of great majority of them:
 "There is to be an immense sale of property by the Sheriff of Burlington Co.,, N. J., the l7th Of September. All the extensive mills. factories rlnt works, and the whole village of Shfevevilie some two miles from Mt Holly, to be sold under fore closure. There is an elegant mansion and twenty dwelling houses, besides the water power of the Ran cocas and in fact group of Improvements on which an immense amount of money has been expended much of which has been hopelessly sunk. The pro- pretors were both deceased before the hard times came But though for years they have manutac- tured about the best article of spool cotton ever made in this country, yet they had to struggle on under all she disadvantages of competition with Br- tioh capitalists who, under the benign influence of free trade, drove own manufacturers to the wall. The once lourising village around these extensive works became sil, mt and idle under the crushing blight and now, when manufacturing in so many other places is stagnant, it is absolutely desolate The cotton thread business is carried on in small way at Mt. Holly, but it has hard time to keep up and earn what it ought to. Worse than all thls there can be but little hope that these factories and improvements will fall into the hands of parties courageous enough to put them in operation while this curse of free trade hangs the industry ot the nation.
 The Treasury is rapidly tending toward bank ruptcy-the expenditures being at the Tate of nearly $2,OO0,O0O per week, and the receipts being likely not to exceed $700,000
 In the midst of all this what is the Adminis- tratioa doing? The President is shuf1ing the cards, in the hope of obtaining renomination, that being the object next his heart. The Sc cretary of the Treasury is assuring his friends of his extreme surprise that trade so very ob- stinately refuses to grow and revenue to in- crease. So far, however, as regards the condi- tion of the people, or the country, both are as calm as d summers morning being, like Mi cawber, quite content to wait, in hopes that something may turn up. The history Of the world may te safely challenged for the produc- tion of so utterly contemptible an Admlnlstra- tion as that of James Buchanan.
 Such being the manner in which the peoples