painfully evident that this effect is taking place in this country. Ministers boast of the exports having increased above £10,000,000 in 1849 over what they were in 1848, and of their having now turned £60,000,000 a-year. Let it be supposed that this is all to be put down to the account of Free Trade, and that our Indian victories, the pacification of Europe, the crushing of revolution in France, and the impulse given to American purchase by Californian gold, had nothing at all to do with the matter. Is the country prosperous?—are the railways prosperous?—are poor-rates declining?—is labour in request either in the rural or urban districts? The facts are notoriously the reverse. At this moment we happen to know that above ten thousand looms in Manchester are preparing to put their mills upon the short time of forty hours a-week. The railways never were so low: at an average, their stock is worth little more than a third of what it was three years ago. Much was said in Parliament of the decrease of poor-rates by £300,000 or £400,000 a-year. That is entirely owing to the fall in the price of provisions, which at once, and materially, lessened the cost of maintaining the paupers. Had the rates fallen really in proportion to the decline in the price of provisions, they would have gone down fifty per cent, or above £2,000,000 annually. A decline of a few hundred thousand pounds a-year only, in such circumstances, was in reality not a fall, but a rise. And in Scotland, the poor-rates for 1849, despite the fall in the cost of maintaining the paupers, were higher than in 1848, or than in any preceding year: they rose from £544,000 a-year to £576,000. As to Ireland, it is admitted on all hands that its condition was never worse, even during the worst periods of the famine.

Now, the real question which it behoves the moneyed interest, and especially the fundholders, to conder, and that most seriously, is this:—How do they expect that the interest on their bonds or the dividends on their stock are to be paid if this ceaseless and progressive decline in the resources of their debtors is to go on? How are the dividends raised for payment of the national creditors, or the interest provided to meet private mortgages, on which so large a part, probably two-thirds, of the realised capital of the country depends? Is it not entirely from the exertions of the producing classes, who, or whose fathers, became debtors in these varied transactions? But is it possible that the security of creditors can escape being shaken, if the resources of their debtors are continually declining? In private life we are never mistaken on this subject. If a creditor sees his debtor's funds wasting away under improvident or absurd management, or a landlord sees his tenants running out his land by scourging and ruinous crops, he at once takes the alarm. But with the public creditors the case is just the reverse. They sit by and see the indirect taxes, upon the faith of which their money was advanced, repealed one after another for a long course of years; and the national armaments, upon which the public safety and the independence of the country depend, threatened with ruin by an ignorant, blind, and selfish democracy; and it never enters into their imaginations for a moment to entertain the least apprehension for their own payments. They think, though every other interest in the country is ruined, they will stand erect amidst the wreck. Deceived by the perfect regularity with which their interest has been paid for the last hundred and fifty years, they cannot conceive that it should ever be otherwise. They would as soon expect to see the sun not rise in the morning, as the dividends on the three-per-cents not paid in January and June. But a little consideration must show that this confidence may ere long be found to be misplaced. The dividends are paid entirely out of the national income: whatever seriously affects or diminishes the national income, so much diminishes the fund from which they must be drawn. The ninety millions which Mr Villiers boasts has been cut off from the remuneration of agriculture has made a fearful chasm in it—probably not less than a third of its whole amount. One other such blow, and the payment of the dividends will become impossible—and the moneyed interest, whose selfish rapacity has occasioned all the mischief, will share in the general ruin they have created.

It is hard to say whether, as society is now constituted and power distributed in this country, the fundholder has most to fear from years of general suffering or from periods of transient prosperity. Is the nation flourishing, are exports increasing, taxes well paid, a surplus revenue beginning to appear, and a huge store of useless and costly bullion accumulated in the bank? We are immediately told the surplus must be devoted to the remission of taxes: it is dangerous to leave the Treasury full; it is a temptation to Government, and serves to feed the younger sons of the aristocracy. No matter how fleeting the surplus may be, though it has arisen from an accidental combination of circumstances which may disappear before the year is out—and it is well known, taxes once taken off are very rarely reimposed—the surplus must be instantly relinquished for the permanent remission of taxes. Are times adverse, do the heavens threaten monetary squalls, and is the import of grain and export of sovereigns likely to lay, as in 1847, half the commercial world on their beam-ends? Instantly the cry gets up that the taxes cannot be paid; that the national expenditure is shamefully extravagant; that the army must be disbanded, the ships of the line sold, and the national independence trusted to the generous cosmopolitan spirit of the Americans, or the unambitious disposition of the Czar. In both circumstances the national safety, and with it the security of the public creditor, are endangered: in the first, by the permanent remission of revenue, in consideration of a transient gleam of prosperity; in the last, by a permanent abandonment of the national defences, in consequence of a temporary period of disaster. And as we inevitably pass now, and must ever pass, under our wise and judicious system of Free Trade and a Fettered Currency, from the one to the other, it is evident that not a year passes over our heads that the security of the fundholders is not more and more endangered, and this by the effects of the very system which their own selfish and class legislation has introduced.

It is to this point—the inevitable reaction of agricultural distress upon commercial prosperity and the general resources of the empire, that we anxiously wish to direct our readers' attention. The theory of the Manchester school is, "Give us a sufficient amount of imports, and the exports will take care of themselves." They care not how widely they may prostrate the industry of the country, so as they get a profitable trade to themselves. But the point they have now to consider, Can they secure this profitable trade to themselves, if the industrial resources of this country—in other words, their customers' means of paying for their goods—are daily declining? That our imports are constantly increasing, is true: it is what the Protectionists always predicted would be the case. But that increase is no index to national prosperity: on the contrary, it is the forerunner of national distress, because it implies a progressive supplanting of our own industry by that of foreigners. The following extract from the Returns for January 1850, ending 5th February 1850, will show how largely the productions of foreign countries are trenching upon those of our own:—