Page images
PDF
EPUB

circulating medium was suddenly | therefore, as the sum is always the

diminished: rents, land, meat, wages, all fell instantly: the borrowers were ruined: trade experienced a shocking stagnation. But, now, at the end of only four months, things have become steady: prices have assumed a settled state; coin has come out in abundance sufficient: we hear the rattle of the dollars once more: and, which is very curious, English guineas and sovereigns and all the other English gold coins are very frequently seen in circulation! Every bank that remains pays in

same nominally, though it be ten times as much really, the reducing of prices must ruin all those who pay to the pawn without getting a part of the interest or pay out of the pawn collection.

:

The Boroughmongers, seeing the danger of continuing a paperbubble, as Grenville now himself calls it. Seeing that a bubble is a thing that may, at any moment, burst, have "resolved" to return to cash-payments; that is to say, they have resolved, that the nation shall, with a currency greatly di

specie upon the nail. French | minished in quantity, continue to

crowns and half crowns form no inconsiderable part of the currency. Plenty of new English shillings and sixpences!

Thus has this country got rid of the degrading curse. But, then, mind, there was, and there is no taxgatherer to come and demand in specie, payment of a tax, laid on in paper-money! Mind THIS; for this is the thing that is producing ruin and starvation in England. The quantity of money afloat here now is, perhaps, not more than threefourths of what it was five months ago. All prices have fallen. But, as there was no taxgatherer to come and demand, as in England, as much in nominal amount as he had demanded before, the evil is temporary; and is, in fact, already got over.

:

pay to the pawn to the former nominal amount of payment; that is to say, to make the nation pay, in fact, two, or, perhaps, three times as much in taxes as it paid before; that is to say, to give to the sinecure placemen the price of two or three bushels of wheat instead of that of one which was given him before. To resolve, my friends, is an easy matter; but, as our pretty fellows will find, to execute a resolution is sometimes a very difficult matter; and, if they execute their resolution, though, it has now assumed the shape of a law, I will give Castlereagh leave to put me upon a gridiron, while Sidmouth stirs the fire, and Canning stands by making a jest of my writhing and my groans. And yet, if they do not execute it, what a figure will they then make? Will any one then have the impudence to pretend to believe, that they are the men to extricate England from her difficulties? And will those littlebands of rapacious miscreants, called PITT CLUBS, any longer dare to show their faces before the oppressed and insulted people, whom they have assisted to plunge into ruin, misery, and degrada

In England the case is wholly different. There the whole of the land and houses and labour are pawned to fundholders and to sine cure placemen, placewomen, pensioners, grantees, and, indeed, to an army too, if that be to continue a permanent establishment. This pawn demands a fixed annual sum to be paid in the way of interest or in that of salary or pay; and, Ition?

[blocks in formation]

You see, then, my friends, that it is the taxes, which is the obstacle to the restoration of the country. If these could be removed, the cash-payments might be resumed with little dimculty. That poor creature, VANSITTART, told us, three years ago last winter, that the way to restore prosperity was to keep up a sinking fund of fourteen millions, which, by drawing small lots of money from the people, would get into great masses, to be lent to the people! I asked the creature at the time, in my Register; whether he did not think, that it might be as well to let the fourteen millions remain in the people's pockets, and not take it away first, and then lend it to them again. This very same thing has now put a stop to twelve out of the fourteen millions of his fund; and this, he says, is the true way of restoring the prosperity of the nation. What, then, are we to expect from such men? The parliament supported him in both instances, by an undivided vote! This sinking fund scheme, which was the joint invention of Pitt and Fox, is now called a "humbug" even within the walls of St. Stephen. It was so called from the out-set by our famous countryman, PAINE. But, the poor, shattered-brained things, who manage our affairs, read ADAM SMITH and such like spinners of intricate stuff. If they had read, and acted upon, the political-economical works of PAINE, instead of venting their poor spite by burning him in effigy, what a happy country England would now have been !

It is the taxes that press you down into the list of paupers, though JUDGE BAILEY (whom I may more fully notice another time) has recently, in a long twat

the of his, told his hearers that taxes are a blessing; a blessing, indeed, they may be to the receivers; but, alas! for the payers! However, it is, in our case, a sudden augmentation of taxes, and an enormous one, under the name of returning to cash-payments, or, rather, of an attempt to return to those payments. The Bank Directors told the wise Committee, that the real question was, not whether they would be able to resume cash-payments, but whether the country would be able to bear the measures necessary to that return. The Borough gentlemen resolved to make the country bear them, and you are now beginning (for it is merely beginning) to feel the effects of the dreadful experiments. Sand and salt, Solomon says, are heavy; but, then the weight of them is nothing, compared with that of a fool's wrath; and POPE says, that it is hard to tell which is most dangerous, a fool's wrath, or a fool's love. Whe

ther it be the wrath or the love of our ninny-hammers to which you are indebted for your present miseries is no matter. That they are the authors of those miseries is certain; and, therefore, it must be most monstrous folly to hope for relief from any other remedy than that of such a reform as shall prevent them from having the power to play their pretty pranks any longer.

If it be asked, whether any other men could have acted in a manner, in this case, less injurious to the nation, my answer is, that I believe it to be impossible to find upon the face of the earth any other set of men, who would, under similar circumstances, have acted in a manner so injurious to the nation. Mind, I am, by no means supposing, that they meant to pour out this curse upon the country: because it is not their interest that ruin and starvation should dry up the means of paying salaries and sinecures. It is not their interest, that you should be made paupers and sent to claim your share of the produce of the land. I am far from supposing that they meant to produce the misery; because that would be to suppose them to be Devils acting knowingly against themselves.No: they did not mean it. They wished to secure themselves in the possession of their power; and, in adopting means, they exhibited that sort of confusion of mind, which is produced by fear operating upon profound ignorance.

and stock-brokering with a smatch of army and naval slangery. As to the great matters, which ought to occupy the minds of statesmen and legislators, nartely, the causes of national prosperity and national misery, they have never thought of these till of late. The money of the country they have left to the Bank, and the taxing to any low, grubbing industrious fellow, that could find out the means of preventing people from avoiding a tax. They have known nothing at all of the effects of paper - money upon prices. They have stood and gaped at these effects, and wondered what produced them. They saw the poor-rates increase, and wondered what could be the cause, especially when provisions were cheap. They found the farmers ruined with large crops in their barns. How they gaped then! There was a want of mouths. There was too much food. That was the cause of the dis

A very eminent lawyer of America, who had read the Report, and who was talking with me about it yesterday morning exclaimed: "D- them, there must " be some men of sense amongst "them." Why," said I, "I " have often said the same thing "to myself; but, really, there tress. Soon after, they had got "cannot be." In the usual sense too much mouth, and too little of the word they are, many of bread. That was the cause of the them, sensible enough. They are sharp men. Know, now, for instance, how to hatch a plot, set a spy to work, draw up a plausible statement, make a catching speech. Canning is a very able banterer and detector of faults and follies, and can, with great ease, raise a laugh against men far more wise and able than himself. Castlereagh is a very expert clerk: can write a smooth letter, and, if not too long, a state-not longer support even the ap

paper on an ordinary official subject. As to Sidmouth he has no one talent, except that of cool assurance, with a most unmeaning look, However, take the whole mass together, their knowledge is a compound of special pleading

misery. There was an over population: population must be checked. Then they had two abundant harvests. Still the misery went on; and went on increasing, too. Finding, at last, that neither times of plenty nor those of scarcity afforded them any relief; finding that neither corn-bills nor dungeon-bills would afford them the means of facing their expenditure; finding that they could

pearances of a sinking fund; compelled to abandon this great humbug; they began to be alarmed in good earnest; and, unwilling to confess their own errors, threw the whole blame on the Bank, came and ransacked the Register, ex

claimed most manfully against | Hunn is made worse to us by the the effects of the paper-bubble, and resolution to return to cash-payresolved to put an end to it by compelling the Bank to pay in coin.

But such men never look at but one part of a subject at a time. They have not the capacity to see all the many parts, of a thing like this, at one and the same time. Their reasoning is like the conduct of a miller, who should know how to set the water-wheel in motion and not know how to feed the hopper. They, therefore, appear not to have looked, at all, at the Debt, the Army, the Sinecures, the Pensions, the Civil List, which demand taxes; or, they were afraid, or ashamed, to look at these things; and, they, while they took away the means of paying these taxes, resolved that the taxes should be paid. They confessed, that the burdens of the people were too great; they said they wished to lighten them; and they resolved to do that which would double their weight !

Let us take an illustration. CANNING'S Mother and Sister, Mrs. HUNN and her daughter, receive five hundred pounds a year out of the taxes. The grant is in these words: "Walter Burrows, "Esq. in trust for Mary and "Maria Hunn, five hundred pounds a year, grant by warrant, dated "20th of May, 1799, to be paid "during their lives, and during "the life of the survivor." So that we have already paid, in principal money, ten thousand pounds to this former play-actress and her daughter, who, it appears, has no higher honour than that of being a half sister of the Portugal Ambassador. But, this is not the point now to be attended to. We are now about to see how this charge of Mrs. Hunn and Miss

ments.

It is very clear, that whatever is taken away from the people who carry on business, who study, or who employ themselves in bodily labour; it is very clear, that, whatever is taken from them, and given to Mrs. Hunn, must leave just so much less with them; just so much less for them to eat, drink, wear, or lay up. Now, then, when the paper-money is largely afloat, and there is no talk of cash payments, the prices of all things are high, and wheat, for instance, sells for fifteen shillings a bushel. Of course, Mrs. Hunn gets from the people, every year, the price of six hundred and sixty-six bushels of wheat. But, if we return to cash payments, and the wheat becomes five shillings a bushel, Mrs. Hunn will get from the people, every year, the price of two thousand bushels of wheat. So that, by this operation, her pension is augmented three fold.

It is not come to this yet; and it never will; for, before it can come to this Mrs. Hunn must live upon the people's dead bodies, for nine tenths of them will be starved to death. But, mind, this is what cash-payments must bring us to. This is, in fact, what the wise men have resolved to bring us to; though they thought they were resolving no such thing. However, the miseries, those additional and extraordinary miseries, that you now experience, are caused by this resolution: they are caused by an attempt, not to pay in specie, but an attempt to prepare to pay in specie. The open effect of this attempt is to make what is vulgarly called a scarcity of money. You see goods fall in price, labour falls in price, people who owe mo

[ocr errors]

ney cannot pay. But, the fact is, ❘ reducing the salaries of the Judges,

that the taxes are raised in real amount, just as Mrs. Hunn's pension is raised. Mrs. Hunn takes ✓ more from us than she took before; and as all the rest who live on the taxes do the same, you are tumbling down into ruin, and the labouring class into a state of halfstarvation...

Well, then, you will say, we can never have specie payments, and this accursed paper-bubble must always continue. Oh, no! It may be put an end to, and the sooner the better. I have, for many years, been urging the necessity of putting an end to it. I know, that there can be neither happi. ness nor safety 'till it be put an end to. But, I have never been such an ass as to propose to put an end to it by making the people pay the present taxes in gold and silver. I had see the salaries es of of the Judges, for instance, DOUBLED since cash-payments ceased; and was I fool-rogue enough to propose to continue to pay this double salary when cash-payments should be revived? No; never. And, when, in 1811, HORNER and the Bullion crew were proposing to make the Bank pay in cash, I, in Paper against Gold bid them reduce the salaries, the pensions, the pay and the interest of the Debt.

Is it not notorious, that the labourers and inanufacturers' wages are reduced in proportion as other prices are reduced? What would you think of a law to compel the farmer to pay John Chopstick the same sum of wages when wheat is five shillings a bushel as when wheat is fifteen shillings a bushel? Why, you would be shocked at the idea of such a law. And yet such a law would be neither more foolish nor more unjust, than a law to return to cash-payments without

together with all pensions, annuities, and so forth, payable out of the taxes.

Well, then, what is to be done? To return to cash payments is necessary, absolutely necessary to the very existence of the nation as an independent state. England is now the only country in the world disgraced by a false papermoney; disgraced by a paper-bubble, that may, at any hour, be puffed-out. While this bubble exists, no man has any thing, that he can, with propriety, call his own. No contract can be good for any thing. A continual violation of contracts must be going on; and there must exist a tyranny and robbery, which, under the name of banking, will blast any bud of prosperity. But, how can the nation defend its rights or its honour with a paper-bubble, that the most feeble state will, at any moment, be able to blow up? There will be no occasion to use powder and ball against such a country. A few thousands of pounds expended on bank notes, properly distributed, will end the war by putting an end to the then existing government, and by throwing the country into utter confusion.

:

The paper-bubble must, then, be got rid of. But, say you, can not this be done without a Reform? The thing is impossible. The interest of the Debt must be, for the far greater part, swept away; and, finally, it must be wholly swept away. The pension list must be reduced to the standard of services. The sinecure list, the grant list, the staff list, the army and all its infinite multitude of colonels and generals must undergo a thorough scouring, and the taxing tribe and

« PreviousContinue »