526 
will effect, he ‘will obviously accomplish. 
Points of his subjects he handles with great 
facility and ability—he is clear, earnest, 
full—occasionally comprehensive, and often 
sagacious, and only errs in the impractica- 
bility of his ends, and the want of measure- 
ment in his means. 
The corn-protecting duties are well argued 
against the landlords--something in this man- 
ner :—These duties bear hard upon trade, and 
of course upon the manufacturing and labour- 
ing poor—that is, the interests of one-third of 
the country—taking in both farmer and farm- 
ing labourer—are protected to the injury of 
those of two-thirds of the country. The land- 
owner assumes, in the teeth of facts, that the 
burden of the taxes falls upon him, and 
to enable him to pay them, his property 
must be protected and privileged. But the 
truth is, he direct taxation, which is all he 
has to complain of, is comparatively insig- 
nificant. The whole amount of direct tax- 
ation is but six millions out of fifty, and the 
whole of that does not fall upon him’ exclu- 
sively. The land tax, of which he croaks 
so much, was, in the reign of George the 
Second, reduced from four shillings in the 
pound to three, and that upon an old rental, 
which has never been raised to this day. 
And, then, as to tithes and poor rates—the 
first do not touch him in the least—they 
never were /iis—they form no part of his 
estate, but are precisely the tenth part of 
that estate, of which he owns the other nine 
—he has as much reason to complain as the 
possessor of the moiety of an estate, that the 
legal owner of the other half withholds it 
from him. And as to poor rates, it may 
be truly affirmed, that, in a very large part 
of the landed property of the country, the 
owners are no sufferers, for they bought it 
with the burden upon it, and paid accord- 
ingly. But the claim of protecting duties, 
on the score of high taxation, is still more 
obviously groundless, when we look to the 
actual rate of rents. During the war they 
rose 150 per cent, while prices rose 75 per- 
haps—the landlords were thus benefitted 75 
per cent.; but though prices have since 
fallen considerably, rents have scarcely fallen 
at all; and landlords, accordingly, are bet- 
ter able to pay their taxation by nearly, if 
not quite, 100 per cent., than they were be- 
fore the war. What claim of right, then, 
can they have to protecting duties? It is 
obvious the price of corn is kept up by these 
duties— landlords would never be fools 
enough to incur the odium they know they 
do, if the duties were not scaly, as well as 
nominally, protecting ones. If the trade 
in corn were free, the price must, by foreign 
competition, come down ; and the landlords 
must lower their rents; but this we see, 
they may do, 100 per cent., and be no 
worse off than before the war. And what 
necessity or pretence is there, for the land- 
lord being placed, now-a-days, in a more 
fayourable position in society than any other 
class? But the truth is, every other class 
Monthly Review of Literature, 
[Nov. 
is injured by this unjust privilege, and espe- 
cially the most numerous of all, the labour- 
ing class. When people invest their capital 
in land, they do so for their own particular 
benefit—they do so as much as the manu- 
facturer, and he should of course be left to 
take the consequences of his own act. If 
he makes a bad bargain, he must abide 
by it—as every man is made to do but 
himself. F 
The capital of the landlord is his land— 
the capital of the monied man is: his money 
—the capital of the tradesman is his stock— 
and the capital of the labourer is his labour. 
If, therefore, the rent of the landlord be 
reduced from £500 to £450 a year; the 
interest of the monied man from £500 to 
£400; the stock of the tradesman from 
£400 to £200; and the wages of the la- 
bourer from’ 3s. to 2s. per day—it follows, 
that all capitals have been reduced in value; 
but that the landed capital has been reduced 
less than any other—and of course he is 
better able to bear the same burdens, if he 
have them still to bear, than before. 
Captain Pettman’s opinions upon the ewr- 
rency, also, are at least worth consideration. 
They are of this cast—prices, he thinks, 
haye not depended on the issues of paper, 
but the issues on the prices. The cause, 
he conceives, is taken for the effect. If the 
demand for. money be reduced—the de- 
mands for the business of circulation—the 
currency may well be contracted without 
changing its value, or producing any effect 
upon prices—for no more can be kept in 
circulation than is actually wanted. People 
do not hoard paper ; if they have more than 
they want, they send it as deposits to a 
bank, or exchange it for some security, 
which returns an interest. If a country 
banker were to purchase an estate, and pay 
for it with his own notes, such notes would 
in a few days be returned to him in ex- 
change for gold, or for Bank of England pa- 
per, or for'some other security—they would 
not remain in circulation, The amount of 
money, and of paper that circulates as 
money, cannot exceed. the sum paid for la- 
bour, or for commodities produced by la- 
bour—in short, it cannot exceed the expen- 
diture; and hence it was, that the efforts 
made by bankers, previous to the late panic, 
to keep an increased quantity of their notes 
in circulation, by reducing the rate of in- 
terest, failed, and brought losses upon all, 
and ruin on many, &c. 
Life of Leigh Richmond, by the Rev. T. 
S. Grimshawe ; 1828.—This Life of Leigh 
Richmond, though of no inconsiderable 
bulk, is yet so strictly personal, and written, 
if we may say it without offence, in so secta~ 
rian a spirit, that it will, and can be read 
by few but those of the class of religionists 
among whom he was deservedly distinguish~ 
ed. His life was exclusively spent, and 
prematurely exhausted, in preaching ; but, 
except as the author of the Dairyman’s 
