adopted a gold standard, the highest standard of money 

 that could be adopted, and which was never the standard 

 of value in this country before ; and we did this just at 

 the worst possible time, viz. when we were enormously 

 in debt. The Debt was thus nearly doubled at a stroke. 

 We engaged to pay in goods, in corn, and in labor, nearly 

 twice the amount of the money we had borrowed. The 

 quantity of money being greatly diminished, prices fell ; 

 corn declined nearly one-half; every man who had taken 

 a lease, or contracted a mortgage, found that he had 

 thereby signed his ruin. Farmers, about 1819, were ruined 

 by thousands ; for this plain reason that they were sub- 

 ject to fixed money payments calculated on a high scale 

 of prices, which they had to discharge with their produce 

 forced down, by the diminution of the circulating medium, 

 to a low scale of prices. All the producing classes, traders 

 and manufacturers, suffered from the same cause ; and 

 then commenced that destructive warfare of the different 

 classes of society, which has been going on to the present 

 time. And this contest of classes will continue till Eng- 

 land's power and wealth are destroyed, unless this great 

 evil, a bad monetary system, be reformed. Whenever the 

 principle of Peel's Bills have been fairly carried out, and 

 the circulating medium has been reduced, distress and 

 ruin have followed : whenever the principle has been de- 

 parted from, or suspended as it has repeatedly been by 

 government through fear of the consequences and the 

 money of the country has been allowed to become ade- 

 quate to the country's wants, a period of comparative 

 prosperity has occurred. Let us, then, learn wisdom by 

 past and bitter experience let no class of the community 

 imagine that they are to be benefited by injuring any 

 other class of their fellow-countrymen but let all unite 

 against the common enemy, viz. the absurd and ruinous 

 monetary system established by PEEL'S BILLS OF 1819 

 AND 1844. 



LONDON : 



SIJIPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO. STATIONERS' HALL COURT; AND 



SKEFFINGTON AND CO. 192, PICCADILLY. 



AND A. METCALFE, RETFORD. 



1851. 



