394 



THE CURRENCY DUEL. 



THE effects of the speeches of the two distinguished leaders of the 

 widely opposed parties upon the question of the currency, recently de- 

 livered at Birmingham, in pursuance of the challenge of Mr. Cobbett to 

 Messrs. Jones and Attwood, will probably be felt in the influence of this 

 controversy upon the government, and a change of those imbecile and 

 tyrannical financial measures which have made England rather the scoff 

 or pity, than the envy of surrounding nations. The true cause of all our 

 national calamities is to be found in the senseless intermeddling with the 

 trade in money, by which every minister of modern times from Pitt to 

 Vansittart and Peel, has deranged the entire machinery of the commer- 

 cial world, and brought a nation superabounding in the blessings of 

 Providence to a condition of famine, rebellion, and despair. Passing by 

 that most fraudulent and tyrannical measure, the Bank Restriction Act 

 of 1799, to which is to be attributed more than four hundred millions 

 of the national debt, we come to the succeeding ministerial folly com- 

 mitted in J819, and at length to that darkest period in all our commer- 

 cial history, the panic of 1825, since which time not a ray of joy has 

 shone upon the land. It has since been common to attribute this panic 

 to innumerable visionary causes : over-trading, over-speculation, over- 

 production, and over-population, and, true to the grand characteristic of 

 folly, which ever rushes to extremes, our ministers thenceforth, to re- 

 strain the spirit of future speculation, adopted measures which, at least, 

 must destroy the commerce and one half the population of this empire. 

 For the panic was in reality an accidental and very temporary stoppage 

 of the course of trade ; and prosperity would soon again have returned 

 to our workshops and our fields, had not the government aggravated, 

 and a thousand-fold increased the misery of the time, by the draining 

 off the life-blood of a commercial country, a small-paper circulation. 

 It is indeed the wildest chimera that ever entered into the mind of man, 

 to suppose that in this great commercial country, the vast transactions 

 of twenty millions of people, can be made to move round without a 

 medium more plentiful than gold; or that a nation, burthened already 

 with eight hundred millions of national debt, can bear to have that sum 

 increased to the amount of sixteen hundred millions, which is the real 

 effect of a compulsory payment in gold, in which it was not contracted, 

 or ever intended to be paid. A government which thus continues to 

 levy a revenue of fifty millions in gold, or more than a hundred millions 

 in paper, can only proceed in such a course for a few short years, 

 until the entire capital of the nation be absorbed, and the merchants, 

 bankers, manufacturers, and the general mass of the people, are drawn 

 into one vast vortex of irretrievable ruin. Already disaffection, hatred, 

 and incendiary fires, are seen all around; our workhouses, jails, and 

 hulks are crowded with the victims of hunger and involuntary crime ; 

 the standing army compelled to be increased to save us from the revolu- 

 tionary fury of a starving population ; and yet, in the midst of these 

 accumulating horrors, we are coolly answered by the minister, " It is 

 now too late to retreat." The most implacable enemy to monarchy 

 could not have desired to see these ministers approaching to a more in- 

 evitable pit-fall of destruction ; and should the Whig ministry persevere 



