The present money laws are believed, by many persons 

 who have given much attention to the subject, to be 

 unsound in principle and ruinous in practice. 



Since the Act of 1819 was passed, every class in the 

 country has, at intervals, been subjected to most severe 

 distress. This distress has been caused by diminishing 

 the money, or circulating medium, of the country, and 

 lowering prices ; and the removal of the distress has been 

 caused by increasing the money of the country, and 

 raising prices high prices and prosperity have gone to- 

 gether, and low prices and distress. And the reason of 

 this is, principally, that we have an enormous debt of 

 which the larger part was contracted in paper money and 

 with a high scale of prices a debt which could never 

 Lave been contracted in any but paper money. The debt 

 at the Commencement of the French war, in 1793, was 

 239,350,148, the debt contracted during the war was 

 608,932,329*. Having to pay annually a sum of nearly 

 30,000,000, as interest of this debt, the English people, 

 with all their efforts, cannot do it without a sufficient 

 quantity of paper money, and a sufficiently high scale of 

 prices. The necessity for high prices in this country 

 arises from this cause, that to the cost or value of every 

 article produced, whether iron, corn, cotton, or cattle, the 

 producer must add the share which he pays of taxes, before 

 he can derive any profit. A man who works in the forge, 

 or on the farm, labours so many hours for himself, and so 

 many hours for his country. The fair price of what he 

 makes, is the value of his labour, added to the proportion 

 of the taxes paid by him while labouring. Now, by dimin- 

 ishing the money of the country, by contracting the circula- 

 tion, prices are forced down and thus the the taxes absorb 

 so large a proportion of the price at which all articles are 

 sold, that no fair remuneration remains for the labourer. 

 In speaking of the labourer, the master is included as well 

 as the man : the man whose head directs, as well as the 

 man whose hand works. But if it be true that a high 

 * M'Culloch's Dictionary of Commerce. 



