"To solder close impossibilities That, however, which was clearly impossible with all the rest of mankind; that which had never existed before, except in the imagination of that poet who had conjured up ghosts and witches to aid him in carrying on his dramatic designs; that which seemed a thing so monstrous as not to be suffered to exist in real life; that thing the Whig faction found the means of accomplishing. the people. They had been preaching econo- | This was the first act of the Whig administramy, and inveighing against the taxes; and, tion; the second was, the bringing into Engabove all things, they had been demanding land from Hanover a body of troops to serve a reform of the Parliament. They began in England and Ireland while English and their ministerial career by an act the most Irish soldiers were employed in fighting the shameful, the most barefaced, the most fla- battles of Germany abroad. There was algrantly profligate, and coutaining in it the ready a body of such troops serving in these greatest insult that had ever been offered to countries: when PITT introduced them, the public opinion, in anycountry calling itself free. Whigs reproached him with breach of the Lord GRENVILLE was, as has been before ob- constitution, and with sinister designs as to served, the Prime Minister of this Whig the liberties of the country; but having ministry; he was as has been the custom for grasped hold of power themselves, they lost a long time, the First Lord of the Treasury; but, scarcely a month before they added to the here arose a difficulty; for he was already number of those troops. At that time the tax Auditor of the Exchequer for life, which office on income, or property, which tax the Whigs purports or pretends to be the post of the had opposed as to its very principle; they had officer who is to examine and check the ac- over and over again protested against it; had counts of the First Lord of the Treasury. To declared it to be a confiscation of men's esunite the two offices; to set a man to audit; tates; had called it a tax levied by force, like that is to say, to examine and check his own the contributions of a highwayman; had accounts; this seemed to be a thing impossi- loaded it with every epithet calculated to exble; it seemed to be what the poet calls cite resentment against those by whom it was imposed and upheld: this tax they found at six and a quarter per cent. upon men's incomes; and instead of abolishing it, instead of lowering it, they at once raised it from six and a quarter to ten per cent.! The manner was here again full as offensive as the matter; for Fox, in speaking in support of the measure, insisted solely upon the necessity of it, and added, that people must do as they could; if they were compelled to move from the first floor to the second, and found themselves unable to remain even there, they must go from the second floor to the garret. In such a case as this, the writer of history can have no authority, except in rare cases, other than the reports published by newspaper reporters. I do not, therefore, pledge myself for the perfect correctness of this saying of Mr. Fox; but I pledge myself for its substance, and for the general discontent and disgust that it excited. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord HENRY PETTY, now Marquess of Lansdowne, had, like all his predecessors, and all his successors, a new scheme of finance; and a report was laid upon the table of the House in a large volume describing this scheme, of which it is necessary only to say that it proposed to pay off the whole of the national debt in the course of comparatively few years, the projector taking the precaution that the debt should not be extinguished too soon nor too suddenly! The mirth and contempt excited by this species of imbecility were soon, however, supplanted by a general alarm at the project of taxation which this Chancellor had prepared. Two projected taxes particularly gave great offence, and, indeed, roused the resentment of the country: the one was a tax on pig iron, and the other a tax on home-brewed beer. Thus, men saw the exciseman coming, at last, to superintend the iron furnaces, and to put their gauging-rules into the barrels in the cellars of private houses. People exclaimed, parodying the words of Scripture, that the little finger of the Whigs was heavier than the loins of the 107. The office of Auditor of the Exchequer, though a perfect sinecure in the person of the Auditor, had been in the hands of Lord GRENVILLE for about twenty years. In the accounts since laid before Parliament, the income of this office is stated at four thousand pounds a year; so that, at the time when Lord GRENVILLE became Prime Minister, he bad drawn from the public purse about eighty thousand pounds on account of this sinecure alone; besides having been a Secretary of State or Speaker of the House of Commons about eighteen years of that time; and having on account of those offices drawn about six thousand pounds a year. The nation thought that something nearly approaching to two hundred thousand pounds might have satisfied a man for twenty years of services; but still he wanted to retain the office of Auditor of the Exchequer, though now become First Lord of the Treasury. To enable him to do this was against all rule, as well as against all reason; it was against all precedent; and, therefore, an Act of Parliament for this express purpose was resorted to: and, as if to make the manner of doing the thing as odious as the matter was offensive to the nation, this act was brought into the House of Commons by CHARLES FOx himself, who had oftentimes reproached this Lord GRENVILLE with having heen one of the chief instruments in the producing and in the prolonging of that war which had brought such hardships upon the people, and the country into such danger. Tories! The war, for undertaking and persevering in which they had condemned PITT in the most vociferous manner, from 1793 to the year 1801; and for renewing which they had reproached ADDINGTON, in 1803, which renewal they denominated by every term expressive of breach of faith and of perfidy; that war, after a pretended attempt to put an end to it, which attempt was a mere blind, they carried on with more expense and extravagance than ever; they found England at peace with the King of Prussia, with whom they went to war solely on the ground that he had committed an act of aggression on Hanover; and, upon that occasion, the Prime Minister, who spoke for the rest, of course, said that Hanover ought to be considered as dear to us | as Hampshire. They granted more pensions without public services, during the fifteen months that they were in power, than had ever been granted at any former period in a like space of time. Keeping in mind their former possessions, they were approached with complaints of abuses which the people hoped that they should now have redressed. These applications, however respectful and humble, they received with more contumely than their predecessors had ever exhibited on similar former occasions; and, finally, not to dwell longer on the enumeration of their offences, they bore themselves towards the people with a loftiness, a haughtiness, with disdain and with insolence such as had never been beheld in any Ministry that had gone before them, As to Parliamentary Reform, not a word escaped them on the subject; and, if spoken of by any independent Member of Parliament, or any-body else, they treated it with that derision with which men treat the words of an idiot. 108. So that, when they were turned out of office, hypocritical as the pretence for turning them out was, foul as were the motives of their rivals, and well as all these were understood by every man of sense in the kingdom, their expulsion from office was a day of jubilee to all England: those who were deluded by the cry of " No Popery," rejoiced at an imaginary escape from a return of the fires in Smithfield; and those who had too much sense to be thus deluded, rejoiced at the mortification inflicted on hypocrisy, perfidy, and insolence, such as few men in the world had ever before witnessed. 109. For these reasons, the return of PERCEVAL and his colleagues to power may be said to have been hailed as a blessing by the nation in general, and by the Parliamentary reformers in particular, who saw clearly, that, as long as the Whigs retained their power in the then state of things, there was not the smallest hope of any reform at all, much less of such a reform as would hold out to the people any fair expectation of a redress of their manifold grievances. They knew, indeed, that PERCEVAL and his party were full as much opposed to reform as the Whigs; but they also knew that the Whigs, as soon as they were turned out of power, would return into the ranks of reform, and, with this assurance in their minds, that, without a reform of the Parliament, by which they would place the people at their back, they never would enter the paradise of power again. So that the joy was general when they were chased from that paradise, the wide world before them, and reform for their only hope. 110. Having thus brought the history of the party intrigues, the history of these two celebrated factions, down to the month of February, 1812, we must now step back a little, and take a look at those money affairs, the management of which, during the career of PERCEVAL, laid the foundation of all those changes. all those troubles, all those important events which have taken place since the year 1810. The restriction, as it was called, on the Bank of England, but which was, in reality, a stoppage of the bank, which took place in the month of February, 1796, had made paper money, that is to say, bank notes, the legal tender of the country; its sole medium of exchange, its sole measure of value. The history of the reign of GEORGE the THIRD, up to the time of the commencement of the regency, will be found to contain a detail of all the contrivances by which the circulation of gold was supplanted by that of paper-money; the detail of all the acts of Parliament; of all those numerous financial tricks by which the country was drained of its gold, and by which its money-affairs were kept going without any real measure of value. But, in the year 1810, PERCEVAL, being Minister, First Lord of the Treasury, and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and VANSITTART being his Secretary of the Treasury, the Whigs, joined by CANNING, HUSKISSON, and some others of the PITT party whom PERCEVAL had kept out of power on account of their evident desire to supplant him ;. the Whigs, thus joined by these disaffected Tories, made and carried a motion for the appointment of a committee to make inquiry into the causes of the depreciation of the paper-money, compared with bullion. That is to say, to inquire into the causes why a one-pound note would sell in the market for no more than about fourteen shillings in silver of due weight and fineness; or, to state it the other way, why a guinea in gold would sell for seven-and-twenty shillings, which was ac-. tually the case when this committee of the House of Commons was moved for and appointed. We must bear in mind, that this committee was called the BULLION COMMITTEE; because, as we shall see further on, it was this committee that laid the foundation of a series of measures, producing, at several stages of the twenty years which have since elapsed, greater confusion in the affairs of the civilized world, greater fluctuation in the nominal value of property of every description, more transfers of property from hand to hand, a greater and more sudden change in men's fortunes, a greater degree of injustice and of suffering, than ever was before produced by any power, whether of kings, of emperors, of legislative bodies, of general councils; and whether producing war pestilence, or famine, as its ultimate effects. was notorious that agents of the Government itself were, at that very moment, purchasing guineas at seven-and-twenty shillings in paper, in order to be sent to the English armies and fleets serving abroad. Our children will hardly believe this, unless there were the records of this house to refer to; and if by any accident they should be destroyed, the fire that consumes them will produce a conflagration to be hailed with delight by all those who have a regard for the honour of England. 111. The paper-money having depreciated in the degree before described, and the coin of the realm having, of course, disappeared, it came into the minds of this Bullion Committee, who chose one THOMAS HORNER, a 112. The proposition of the bullion comScotch lawyer, and an Edinburgh reviewer, mittee was, indeed, free from the charge of as their Chairman; it came into the heads of impudent falsehood; but of its folly it would this committee, of which CANNING and Hus- be very difficult to produce an equal amongst KISSON were two, to make, in the spring of the all the wild schemes of hasty and shallowyear 1810, a report to the House, recom-minded men. The exportation of the precious mending that the Bank of England should be metals which had been produced by substitutcompelled by law to resume its payments in ing paper for gold and silver, had sent that specie, according to the terms of its charter; large proportion of the whole of the specie of that is to say, that it should be compelled, at the civilized world; had sent that large share, the end of two years from the date of the act which always must belong to a country so which it proposed to be passed, to pay its abundant in valuable things as England is; notes on demand in the current coin of the had sent that large share to be distributed realm. This report was made to the House, as amongst the other nations of the world. This I have observed before, in 1810; but it did not caused prices to rise in all those other councome on to be discussed until the winter of tries; but, the rise was still greater in Eng1811, when there took place that which will land herself, because the paper cost nothing, be remembered during the lives of those who and because there was not, and could not be, were alive at that time and acting on the any check on the increase of its quantity. scene; but which, if related to posterity, will This rise in the price of commodities of every hardly be deemed to be possible. PERCEVAL description, and also in the price of real proand his party contended against the passing perty, had produced an outrageous violation of the proposed act. Well they might; of contracts for time of every description. A for to execute the act would have been farm, mortgaged twenty years before for a absolutely impossible without putting a stop thousand pounds, had now to pay in reality to the war, which was still going on at a the interest of little better than half the sum. rate more expensive than ever, and without, It had produced a virtual violation of testamoreover, plunging the whole kingdom into ments, of marriage settlements, of grants of confusion; but, their objection was founded annuities, and, in short, of every contract for on an assertion of the most impudent false-time, be the nature of it what it might. hood that ever was attempted to be imposed upon any portion of mankind. PERCEVAL and his party contended that the paper-money had not depreciated; but that it was the gold that had risen in price! After many days of debating upon the subject, VANSITTART proposed a resolution to the house, which was this: "That the promissory notes of the said company (Bank of England) have hitherto "been, and are, at this time, held in public "estimation to be equivalent to the legal coin of "the realm, and generally accepted as such, "in all pecuniary transactions to which such coin is legally applicable." Our children will hardly believe that a legislative assembly, all bound by oath to do their duty to his Majesty and the people, could be brought to adopt this resolution, in the face of a report of their own house, founded on the evidence of numerous merchants, baukers, and traders, that a guinea would sell for seven-and-twenty shillings in bank notes; and that, of course, it required a one-pound note and seven shillings in silver to purchase a guinea in gold. Yet did this house, consisting of six hundred and fifty-eight members, actually pass this resolution by a majority of three to one; though it 113. The bullion committee, with a very dull man at its head, and with not a member belonging to it of any profundity, wishing to put an end to this progress of depreciation of the paper, thought they had found out the remedy in their proposition to compel the bank to return to a payment of its notes in gold. But this committee did not reflect that, if this measure were adopted, a violation of contracts on the other side would take place; they did not recollect the wills that had been made, the mortgages entered into, the marriage settlements made, the annuities granted, the leases for various terms entered into; they did not recollect the number of these which must have taken place since the work of depreciation had begun; they did not recollect that if the lenders had been robbed before, the borrower would be robbed now; and that, though it is at all times unjust to rob either lender or borrower, it is a thousand times more dangerous to a state, a thousand times more injurious to the community at large, to do wrong to the borrower than it is to do wrong to the lender; because the borrower is of necessity the poorer of the two; and, for the more impor tant reason, that the industry and activity of the country are to proceed from the borrower and not from the lender. this; these words being put upon the paper in June, 1831. The discussions of which I have been speaking took place in the session of 1811, and the RESOLUTION above cited was passed on the 3rd of May in that year, three months after the Prince Regent chose PERCEVAL and his colleagues, and rejected the Whigs. But, in spite of this consoling resolution, the depreciation of the paper being found to go one price for gold and another price for paper. Landlords in divers instances, seeing that the progress of the depreciation would soon rob them of the whole of their rents, began to make specific contracts to prevent their estates arriving at this point. In order to secure himself against a total loss of his rents, Lord KING, a baron of the House of Peers, demanded of his tenants payments of his rents in gold; but, at the same time, made the demand in so equitable a manner, as to leave those tenants no just cause of complaint. I have observed before, that there was in reality no standard of value; but Lord KING, taking. the market price of gold as his standard, first ascertained, by looking back at the regular records, how much paper a guinea was worth, at the time the lease was granted';. he then examined into the fact of how much paper a guinea was worth at the time of the payment of the rent; and according to that standard, he demanded payment; or, if that were refused, he demanded payment in gold in full tale, and of full weight and fineness. This the law, as it then stood, enabled him to do; because, though the law sanctioned, in effect, the payment of debts, in general, in bank notes, it did not, as yet, go the length of compelling a creditor to accept of payment in that way. It prevented him from proceeding to recover the debt by mesne process, and gave other indulgences to the debtor; but it had not yet taken from the laudlord the power of distraint, in case of non-payment of rent. 114. But, above all things, the members of this committee forgot, or had not the powers of mind duly to estimate, the vast cousequence, the great, the terrible consequence of compelling a nation to pay iu gold of full tale and full weight and fineness, sums enormous which it had borrowed in depreciated paper. From the time when the paper began to de-rapidly on, people began to make two prices, preciate, to the time when the bullion committee proposed that the bank should be compelled to pay its notes in gold, more than FIVE HUNDRED MILLIONS of pounds sterling of the debt had been contracted; that is to say, the Parliament had borrowed more than five hundred millions in depreciated paper, which the bullion committee now proposed that the nation should be compelled to pay in gold of full weight and fineness. And we are here to observe, that the difference between fourteen and twenty, as stated by the bullion committee, was not the real difference between the value of the paper and that of the gold. Gold having been driven out of the circulation of the country, there was, in fact, no measure of value for it as compared with the paper; there was no standard of value left in the country; there was no market price of gold; because there was no deposit to which the people could go to demand gold in exchange for the paper. Guineas were sold, it is true; but the seller sold with all the disadvantages attending an application of the commodity with regard to which application he understood nothing. The guinea, when purchased, was exported; and, of course, the profit and risk of the exporter must be con sidered as added to the price of the commodity; so that, there being no standard in either gold or silver whereby to ascertain the amount of the depreciation of the paper, another standard must be sought, and the best and truest that presents itself is the bushel of wheat, with regard to which the fact is, that 116. It was easy to perceive that the examon an average of years, the bushel of wheat, ple of Lord KING would be speedily and geneafter the depreciation of the paper began, rally followed by the landowners; for they down to the time of the report of the bullion were greatly suffering in their incomes from committee, had been more than double the the depreciation of the paper-money. The miprice at which that commodity had sold on annister saw, on the other hand, that a demand average of years, during an equal number of years preceding the commencement of the depreciation. 115. Therefore, to compel the nation to pay in gold the interest of sumis borrowed in paper, must have been ruinous to all the active classes of society; to all, indeed, but the lenders of money. So far as the rejection of this proposition went, the ministers acted wisely; and, let it be observed, in passing, that this was a Whig proposition; that HORNER was a Creature of the GRENVILLES; that he was an Edinburgh Reviewer; that his project was supported by the whole body of the Whigs; and that, thus it was they who laid the foundation of all the confusion and all the terrible ruin, in the pecuniary affairs of the nation, which have taken place between that day and of gold payments on the part of the landlords would soon produce two prices openly in all the pecuniary transactions of life; they saw that gold would become the medium of those transactions between man and man; that the taxes would be paid in paper-money, according to the law as it then stood; and that, as the paper would then continue to depreciate at a still greater rate, the goverment must go to pieces for want of means to carry it on, and this, too, at a time when the expenditure was perfectly enormous on account of the war. Nothing could prevent these consequences but the passing of a new law; and, therefore, in the month of June, a law was brought in, and it was passed on the 11th of July of this same year, 1811. This law set out with making it a misdemeanor, punishable by fine and impri sonment, and, if in Scotland, by transportation, to consider their verdict. They soon for any person to exchange the current gold coin for more than its nominal value in bank intimated to the Judge that they could notes, or to exchange bank notes for less than their nominal value in the current gold coin; not agree, and were not likely to agree, and it then enabled tenants to refuse to pay when a fresh officer was sworn in to their landlords in gold; and, in case of dis traint, to replevy the goods taken in distress, attend upon them for the night. Many after tendering the landlord payment in bank notes! Thus, on the 3d of May, 1811, these persons remained in the Court all 658 representatives of the people passed a re solution declaring that bank notes were at night, sleeping about in different parts that time in public estimation to be equivalent, of it; and at ten minutes after nineor equal in value, to the current coin of the realm; and on the 24th of July, in that same this morning, the Judge having aryear, 1811; that is to say, in sixty-two days after the passing of the resolution, that very rived, the Jury came up and ansame 658 representatives passed a law to fine, nounced that they could not agree; imprison, and, in some cases, transport, any man who, in any pecuniary transaction, should give a preference to the gold before the that they were six for and six against paper! and (hear it our children, and restrain acquittal, and upon this, his Lordship your indignation, if you can!) the man, Ni CHOLAS VANSITTART, who proposed both the discharged them, which amounts to an resolution and the law, has since been made a peer of the realm, under the title of the BARON ACQUITTAL. of BEXLEY! 117. I shall here leave this affair of the I do not know whether I shall be paper-money at present; not, however, without beseeching the reader to let it remain deeply imprinted on his mind, because he will Trial in the Register; but I know that have to recur to this transaction as to the root able to publish the full report of this. of those numerous legislative proceedings a full report will be published, of which which have related and which relate to the currency of the country, which have produced due notice will be given. so much distress and so much confusion, and which, of all the causes which have been at work, has been the most conspicuous and the most powerful in the producing of those great changes in the beginning of which we are now living in the year one thousand eight hundred and thirty-one. (To be continued.) Friday Morning, 8th July, 1831. WM. COBBETT. LIBERAL WHIG PROSECUTION. THIS prosecution came on yesterday to be tried in the Court of King's Bench, at the Guildhall of the City of London. I had against me the ATTORNEY-GEN From the LONDON GAZETTE, FRIDAY, JULY 1, 1831. BANKRUPTCIES SUPERSEDED. LANSDOWN, T. P., Clutton, Somersetshire, victualler. LODGE, D., Poole, ironmonger. WOODHEAD, A., Salford, Lancashire, common brewer. BANKRUPTS. ATKIN, D., and D. Wheeler, Lower Marsh, ERAL, Mr. GURNEY, and Mr. WEIGHT-DRAKEFORD, D., Meeting-House-court, MAN; and for me, MYSELF. It occu-FEATHAM, R., Brookesby-street, Islington, pied the time from half-past nine in, the morning till five minutes after six in the evening, when the Jury retired Old Jewry, broker... builder. GIBBS, W., Savage-gardens, wine-merchant. |