reigning-a popular monarch over satisfied subjects; the King of the Netherlands would have still had an undivided kingdom under his sway, and Poland would have remained quiet under institu'tions which, whatever might be the theoretical objections to them, were working much practical good towards a population deficient in the arts of industry and commerce. These are serious lessons, and it is always useful to practise the mind in conceiving what different turn affairs would have taken, under the supposition of the reversal of some event of powerful influence which has occurred. It certainly seems plain that all the political mischief we have witnessed in the last three years may be traced to that single folly in the French family, in perpetually harbouring hopes, and betraying desires and intentions of re-establishing, by the first opportunity, the principle of divine right; and if our aristocracy think that in virtue of some analogous hereditary claims, as lords of the soil, they are to perpetuate their families and their patrimonies by any other means than by their own prudent management of their estates, according to their intrinsic values, they may some day be repudiated for sentiments equally inconsistent with the natural rights, and the common sense of mankind. They have the good fortune of being placed among a people strongly attached to them by disposition and by habit, and who are sensible of the advantages, while they delight in the splendour of a high and hereditary nobility; and, therefore, if disagreement ensue, there can be no doubt as to the side on which the fault, as well as the chief sufferings must lie. But the people delight in the splendour of their nobility, only in the contemplation that it is maintained by the intrinsic resources of their own broad possessions. If the people, rich or poor, are made to support that splendour from their own means, they must cease to respect it.

The National Debt is set forth as the reason for a corn act, upon two separate grounds. First, its quantity alone is advanced as a ground for protection; this I have already dealt with. Next, its quality-the nature of its composition, is objected to; and into this I am about to inquire.

It is charged against the monied interest by the landed interest, that the fundholder lent only depreciated bank-notes, and that, therefore, he has not any just claim to be repaid in sterling money. This argument is chiefly founded upon the very high

price of gold, computed in bank-notes, which prevailed during the last five or six years of the war; and my answer to it, for them at least, is, that that higher price of gold was, to them, a fertile source of extraordinary profits, such as must form, in their case, an ample set-off against the evil consequences they point out. The subject lies in a small compass. It has been shown that the price of English corn was raised during the war, pari passu, with the expenses attending the importation of foreign corn. Now one of the most material ingredients of those expenses was the high price of gold. If we examine the question with the illustrative aids of assumed sums, in figures, the amount will stand somewhat in the following manner :-The depreciation of the currency may be taken at twenty-five per cent.; the finance minister, therefore, must be supposed to have raised a loan of twenty-five millons, when twenty millions would otherwise have been sufficient for him. But then, if this additional five millions went, as I contend it did, directly into the pockets of the landed interest, without any equivalent consideration from them, they received their indemnification for the excess; the account upon the score of depreciation, was settled with them at the time, and they can have no after claim upon that ground. The question then is, whether this five millions did go into their pockets in the manner I have stated.

Every merchant remembers the great difficulty which, at the time referred to, attended the remittance of funds to the Continent to pay for our imports; and that, to exorbitant freights and heavy insurances, which, under the circumstances of the intercourse, were well earned by the parties who received them, there was to be added the loss on the foreign exchanges; or, in other words, the difference between the Mint price and the market price of gold, in making up the amount of charges on foreign corn. But although in respect of English corn which was already at home, there was of course no freight, no insurance, no remittance, still all the charges upon foreign corn under those heads, including the difference between the Mint price and the market price of gold, were simultaneously added to every quarter of English corn, as fully and specifically, shilling for shilling, as if the identical quarter had formed part of the cargo of the "Vrow Wilhelmina, Jansen, master, from Dantzick."

Let the market prices of gold from 1797 to 1815 be examined,

and account be made out of the sums by which the respective loans, received in bank-notes, were greater than they would have been if received in gold; and then compare, year by year, the ascertained excess of those loans with an equal per-centage increase upon the prices of all the agricultural produce of the country computed in gold. If a debtor and creditor account of this nature were made out, the landed interest would be chargeable with a heavy balance, because it will be found that the prices of agricultural produce, even when computed in gold, were enormously high. By an irresistible operation of commerce, it must have occurred, that the necessity we were under of importing large quantities of foreign corn, which could not be obtained without indemnifying the foreign seller for any depreciation in our currency; that is to say, for any difference between the market and the Mint price of gold with us, would enable the home-grower to demand the same indemnification for himself. When one foreign hand was held out to receive the computed sum, twenty English hands were thrust forward at the same time, with the same demand, and the same sum was put into each of them.

The immense importance to us of the single fact, that the national agriculture proved to be inadequate to the feeding of the people during the war, has never been properly adverted to; and consequently the true character and operation of that fact has escaped observation. Strange to say, a case of absolute want and palpable distress was mistaken for prosperity. To portion of the people, no doubt, it brought great prosperity, but to the nation it was a positive loss, the amount of which is now represented in the form of perhaps a full fourth of our present National Debt. To the makers of gunpowder, the manufacturers of muskets and cannons, and to the holders of saltpetre or naval stores, the breaking out of a war is the legitimate promise of a new harvest of profits; but not so to the farmer. The prices of the peculiar material of war may naturally rise with the occurrence of war, but the general food of a people need not rise also,* unless, indeed, their country should become the seat of hostilities.

If we were to trace the occurrences of the war, and test them by the supposition that the agricultural produce of the country,

In the American war the value of land was very much depressed.

which was abundant up to the commencement of it, had continued to be equal to the demand, or nearly so, we should see that some of the greatest difficulties of our situation would have been avoided, or much alleviated. By nothing was the country more embarrassed than by the necessity we were under of placing large funds on the Continent, both for state and for commercial purposes, during the war, and particularly in the last five or six years of it, when our merchants were prevented, by the Berlin and Milan decrees, from rendering their merchandise-as it always ought, alone, to be—the medium of remittance; and it will easily be comprehended how greatly their difficulties must have been increased by the additional necessity of making remittances in payment for foreign corn.

The landed interest cannot suppose that I am upbraiding them with this deficiency of their produce, or that I insinuate blame to them for accepting enormous profits which, from such causes, incidentally fell into their hands. But I charge them with ridiculous arrogance, for boasting that they mainly assisted in carrying the country through the war; and with the basest ingratitude for turning round upon the country in the manner they did as soon as it was over. If the true nature of the case had been understood at the time, nothing would have been more just than to have restored, or rather preserved, in some degree the proper balance between the different interests of the country, by the imposition of a very heavy tax upon land. Any charge that was clearly less than the unusual portion of the expenses of importation on foreign corn would have been easily borne without the least derangement of our agriculture. The only effect would have been to have prevented a most uncalled-for increase of rents. The country might, with great propriety, have held this language to the agriculturists:-The calamities of war, and the difficulties under which the nation is labouring, have an incidental tendency to throw great and most unnecessary profits, at the public cost, into your hands; it is, therefore, only an act of justice to the public to call upon you to restore some of those profits to the nation, for the purposes of that state of warfare which is the sole cause and source of them. Nothing of this kind was attempted, nor is any sort of restitution desired; but when the benefited party complains, the losing party may well desire an investigation of the accounts between them. It is the particular

purpose of these letters to examine these accounts, in order that the relative situations of the several great interests of the country -the agricultural, the trading, and the moneyed interests-may be thoroughly understood.

I am confident that I cannot be wrong in saying, that the agriculturists were indemnified, in the price of their produce, for every shilling by which the National Debt was increased in consequence of the difference between the Mint price and the market price of gold, and that therefore they, of all people, should be the last to object to bearing their share of the common taxation out of which the interest of the debt is paid. Nor was this advantage confined to the landed interest, although few others had the opportunity of enjoying it; but every trade which raised or manufactured an article, of which the home supply was so much below the demand that the consumers were obliged to have recourse to importation, was enabled to add to the price of that article all the extraordinary charges of freight and insurance, as well as the loss in purchasing gold for remittance, which were necessarily incurred in bringing the like description of goods from abroad.

The difficulties which the merchants were under in making foreign payments were peculiar to the description of warfare we were carrying on. It was not that they were deficient in exportable commodities suitable to the purposes of remittance, both in quality and in price, but solely that they could not obtain admission for their goods into the continental ports, by reason of impediments of a warlike, and not of a commercial nature.

This, however, is a different subject, worthy, perhaps, of more consideration than has been bestowed upon it in any of the discussions upon our currency. I am not now investigating the cause of the high price of gold during the war, but the effect of it upon the prices of our own agricultural produce; and I trust I have shown, that in those prices the landed interest were amply indemnified for all the increase which may have been made to the National Debt in consequence of the difference between the Mint price and the market price of gold. They were indemnified in the most direct and perfect manner that can be imagined; they received the money itself, and more than the money. The rate of the indemnification was exact; and the sufficiency of the aggregate amount of it will never be doubted by any man who