648 Monthly Review of Literature. 



ports. It is quite clear that we must look to some other expedient for relieving 

 ourselves from embarrassments than a stupid adherence to a monetary system 

 which is a monument of folly and injustice. If it be true that we are in a 

 far worse condition for making payments in gold now than we were in 1797> 

 we must look, either to our system of taxation and see if it be not capable 

 of such adjustment or reform, as that the rich, the accumulating part of the 

 people should bear their proportion of the national burdens and so relieve the 

 less wealthy members of the community who now bear three-fourths of the 

 whole taxation, or else to an expansion of the circulating medium, which 

 may relieve us from the evils of our present confinement by raising us to the 

 state in which we were before Peel's ill-starred act : this expansion must be 

 effected by the establishment of a national paper currency, a currency not 

 dependent on the ex-eathcdrd dictates issuing from a bank parlour, not ma- 

 naged by this private body or that corporation, but the property of the nation 

 managed by a body of employed men immediately and unreservedly respon- 

 sible to the Commons of England. With respect to the establishment of a 

 property- tax or income-tax there are so many acknowledged difficulties, that 

 it seems scarcely capable of adoption ; and we would employ the other as 

 equally safe and more easy of adoption, although the former measure would 

 be by far the juster of the two. As for the present state of things, we feel as 

 certain as of our own existence that this country cannot endure it much 

 longer : indeed it is arithmetically demonstrable. Men of business, whose 

 brains are not bewildered by pre-conceived opinions imbibed from the profes- 

 sional economists, are beginning to open their eyes to the perilous state in 

 which we now are, and to wonder that the sages who talk so wisely but act 

 so sillily, should not have legislated with more prudence and discretion. All 

 classes around them are plunged in distress : let them ask the farmers to 

 compare the outlay of raising a bushel of wheat or any other grain with the 

 profits from its sale, and they will find that both farmers and men must be in 

 distress : let them go to Manchester, Spitalfields, and other manufacturing 

 districts, and they will find that industry cannot procure a bare subsistence : 

 and if they would confine their observations to this metropolis, their eyes 

 every day behold so many symptoms of the greatest distress even among par- 

 ties of acknowledged respectability and capital, a distress, which the rational 

 self-interest of bankers and capitalists will not relieve except for an extrava- 

 gant consideration, that they cannot doubt that we are and must be on the 

 eve of a great and radical change, forjthe better, let us hope, for in a worse 

 plight we scarcely can be. 



Much space, it must be confessed, has been taken up in noticing this very 

 small brochure; but we have been guided not by its size but its importance. 

 Its object is to disseminate in a homely and familiar form principles of finan- 

 cial economy that we consider to be based on truth. The author has been 

 successful in embracing within the compass of a small tract the more im- 

 portant arguments on which his views and our views are founded, and we 

 would that a copy of this little pamphlet (which might easily be made into a 

 three-half-penny tract), were in the hands of every intelligent and unpreju- 

 diced Englishman throughout these realms, 



State and Prospects of British Agriculture, &c. By A MEMBER OF 

 PARLIAMENT. 8vo. Ridgeway. 



THE M. P. who has condensed the three ponderous folios of the Evidence 

 before the Commons' Agricultural Committee into 208 octavo pages, has 

 done the State some service. Such evidence, given by the highest men of the 

 agricultural profession, is highly valuable and ought to be generally accessible. 

 The moderate price at which this compilation is fixed, will, as we trust, in- 

 duce practical men to become its possessors ; and certainly they cannot be 

 xaisemployed in giving the evidence a thorough perusal. We have on severa! 



