Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 392, June, 1848

The West India interest demonstrated in a manner "luce meridiana clarius," that the equalisation of the duties of foreign slave-grown to home free-labour-raised sugar, would prove utter ruin to our West India colonies, and reinstate in frightful activity the infernal traffic of the slave-trade; but this did not produce the slightest impression on government, and they without hesitation consigned these noble colonies to destruction, and restored the slave-trade throughout the globe, rather than abate one iota of the dogmas of free-trade, or raise sugar a penny a-pound.5 All the great cities of the empire have sent deputations or memorials to government, beseeching in the most earnest manner a grant of exchequer bills, or the aid of treasury credit in some way, to set agoing the unfinished lines of railways, and enable them to find a certain amount of labour for the unemployed; but they have every where, met with a decided refusal. We must have free-trade in every thing, in pauperism, typhus fever, and insurrection, as well as in corn, cotton, or sugar. Laissez faire is the universal system: all government has to do is to hinder the competitors coming to blows. Every thing must find its level, though that level to one-half of the community is the bottom of the cellar. One thing only is to be protected, and that is gold; one class only is to be saved from competition, and that class is the great capitalists.

This obstinate resistance of government to the wishes, and declared insensibility to the wants and necessities of the country, is the more remarkable that it exhibits so striking a contrast to the paternal spirit by which government was formerly actuated. Suffering, never indeed approaching in extent and intensity to that which now afflicts the nation, but still sufficiently distressing, has been often experienced in former times; but on none of these did the government hesitate to come forward with a large grant, founded on the public credit, to alleviate the general calamity, and always with the very best effects. In 1793, in consequence of the breaking out of the war, and the general hoarding which took place in France during the terrors of the Revolution, a great export of gold from the British islands to the Continent took place; but Mr Pitt at once came forward with a grant of £5,000,000 to aid the commercial interest; and so rapidly did this well-timed advance restore credit, that a small part only of this large sum was taken up, and very little of it was lost to the nation. In February 1797, a similar cause produced that great run on the bank which brought that establishment to the verge of ruin; but the same minister instantly introduced the suspension of cash payments, which at once restored credit, revived industry, and carried the nation in a triumphant manner through all the dangers and crises of the war. In 1799 and 1800, two successive bad harvests brought the nation to the verge of starvation; but government interposed by various sumptuary laws regarding food, stopped distillation from grain, and themselves imported immense quantities of Indian corn for the use of the people. In 1811, a similar calamity ensued from the effects of Napoleon's continental blockade, and the American Non-intercourse Act; but government again interposed with an issue of exchequer bills, and confidence was restored, and with it industry and commerce revived.

In 1826 very great depression existed in all branches of industry, in consequence of the dreadful monetary crisis of December 1825; but government stopped the crash, as Lord Ashburton has told us, by issuing £2,000,000 of old and forgotten notes from the Bank of England, and then alleviated the distress by a copious issue of exchequer bills to aid the commercial interest, which soon brought the nation out of its difficulties. But since the government has been popularised by the revolution of 1832, nothing of the kind has been done. The long-protracted distress from 1838 to 1841, and the dreadful suffering of 1847-8, have been alike unable to extort for British suffering one farthing in aid of the national industry from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The principle laissez faire has prevailed alike over the strongest claims of justice and the most piteous tales of suffering. Government seems resolved that the nation shall drain the lees of free-trade to the dregs, and taste it in all its bitterness. It is no consolation to suffering British industry to see that £10,000,000 was in one year voted to suffering Irish idleness, and £20,000,000 in another to the grand step in West Indian ruin. The people see that the first was yielded to terror, the last to fanaticism; and the melancholy conviction has forced itself on every mind that government now yield to nothing but the strongest pressure from without; and that the doors of the Treasury will be opened only to the fierce demand of threatened high treason, or the reverberated echoes of wide-spread delusion.

Ministers were aware of all this; and they knew also that, on the first declaration of war with France or any foreign power, they would at once raise a loan or issue exchequer bills to the extent of at least £20,000,000 sterling. Here is an enemy worse than the French, or the French and the Repealers united – want, fever, famine, disaffection, despair, actually within our bosom, and consuming the very vitals of the state! A word from the Chancellor of the Exchequer would at once arrest the misery, dispel the sedition, restore bread to millions, revive loyalty in a wasted and perishing state.6 Why, then, is it not instantly done? why does not government eagerly seize so glorious an opportunity of healing the wounds of the suffering people, and extinguishing, by deeds of beneficence, the demons of discord and disaffection in the realm? Because it would interfere with a principle; it would intercept the free employment of wealth; it might alarm capitalists, lower the value of Exchequer bills, and for a week or two depress the funds a-half, or perhaps one per cent. It would be a substantial extension of the currency, and that would imply an avowal that it had formerly been unduly contracted; it might be quoted against ministers as a tardy and reluctant admission of the error of their former monetary policy in the parliamentary committee, or in the House of Commons! It is for such wretched considerations as these that relief is refused, and want, wretchedness, and treason prolonged throughout the kingdom. Were the subject not so serious, and even terrible in all its bearings, their conduct would remind us of the well-known reasons assigned by Dr Sangrado to Gil Blas, for continuing, to the evident destruction of his patients, the system of hot water and bleeding.

"'Sir,' said I one evening to Dr Sangrado, 'I call heaven to witness, that I exactly follow out your method, nevertheless all my patients slip out of my hands to the other world: one would think they take a pleasure in dying, to discredit our system… If you would follow my advice,' replied I, 'we would change our system of practice.' 'I would willingly,' replied he, 'make the trial, if it led to no other consequences than those you have mentioned; but I have published a book in which I extol the frequent use of the lancet and hot water; do you wish me to decry my own work?' 'Oh! you are right,' replied I, 'you must never think of giving such a triumph to your enemies: they would say you have at length confessed your error; that would ruin your reputation: perish rather the noblesse, the clergy, and the people. Let us go on as we have begun.' We continued accordingly our system, and went on with such expedition, that in six weeks we had occasioned as many funerals as the siege of Troy."7

We speak advisedly, and after a full observation of its effects, when we say, that the great majority of the unhappy persons who, within the last year, have been sent into the Gazette, owe their ruin as completely and exclusively to the measures of government, as Dr Sangrado's patients did their death to the copious bleedings and warm water draughts which he prescribed to them. Only think what our rulers have done, and then say whether any save colossal private fortunes, engaged in mercantile adventures, could withstand the effects of their measures.

I. The government, in the first place, by the bill of 1819, compelled the Bank of England to pay its notes in gold; by the act of 1826 prohibited the issuing of any notes below five pounds; and by the act of 1844 in England, and 1845 in Scotland and Ireland, restricted the notes issuable on securities, in the whole empire, to £32,000,000, declaring that, for every note beyond that limit issued by any bank, sovereigns to an equal amount must be stored up in the vaults of the issuer. In a word, they made the whole circulation beyond £32,000,000 a metallic currency. At the same time, they provided that, for every five sovereigns beyond a certain limit withdrawn from the Bank of England, a five-pound note should be withdrawn by that establishment from the circulation.

II. Having thus laid the nation fast in golden fetters, and prevented the possibility of an extension of the currency, for carrying on all undertakings beyond this £32,000,000, save by an augmentation of the gold coin in the country, government next proceeded to give every possible encouragement to railway undertakings, and to pass bills through the legislature for new undertakings of that description, requiring the outlay from 1845 to 1848 of at least £150,000,000 sterling, in addition to the ordinary expenditure and operations of the country, already raised at that period to an unusual and unprecedented height.

III. Having thus, in 1844 and 1845, landed the empire in an extraordinary and unheard-of amount of undertakings, requiring the utmost possible extension of the currency to carry these on, government, in 1846, next proceeded to introduce the free-trade system – allow the free importation of foreign grain, and throw down the protection barriers which had hitherto alone sheltered the native industry of the empire, and prevented, save on extraordinary emergencies, any considerable drain upon its metallic resources. They thus raised the imports to £85,000,000, sent the metallic circulation headlong out of the country, and of course contracted, by the force of the law of 1844, in a similar proportion, its paper circulation. By the two combined, they occasioned such a strain upon the bank that, in the end of October 1847, it was within a few days of stopping payment. Ministers were in consequence obliged to suspend the Bank Charter Act; but not till an amount of bankruptcy had been brought upon the middle class, and misery upon the people, unparalled in the history of Great Britain.

IV. Free-trade having exposed our colonists in the West Indies, who were charged with an indolent emancipated black population, to a direct competition with the slave colonies of other countries, where sugar, being raised by forced labour, could be brought to the market at little more than half the price which it cost in the British – government next obstinately adhered to their determination to ruin these colonies, and destroy capital to the amount of £100,000,000 sterling, rather than abate one iota of their free-trade principles; realising thus, indeed, the exclamation of Robespierre – "Perish the colonies, rather than one principle be abandoned!" The consequence is, that one half of the estates in the British West India islands will go out of cultivation, and be choked with jungle in the course of this year. Agricultural produce, once averaging £22,000,000 annually, will be destroyed in the next: a market once taking off £3,600,000 of our manufactures, and giving employment to 250,000 tons of our shipping, will be extinguished; and the foreign slave-colonies, having beat down British competition, will get the monopoly of the sugar-market of the world into their own hands, and raise its price to 7d. or 8d. a pound in the English market – thus terminating the miserable advantage for which all these disasters are incurred.

Whoever considers seriously, and in a dispassionate mode, the necessary effect of the measures on the part of government which have now been detailed, so far from being surprised at the extent of the devastation and ruin which has occurred simultaneously in Great Britain, Ireland, the East and West Indies, will only be surprised that it has not been greater and more wide-spread than it actually has been. He will regard it as the most decisive proof of the vast resources of the British empire, and the indomitable energy of the British people, that they have been able to bear up at all against such repeated and gratuitous blows, levelled, not intentionally, but from mistaken principles, by their own rulers at the main sources of national prosperity. And he will not consider it the least remarkable circumstance, in this age of wonders, that when the ruinous effects of these their own measures had been clearly and beyond all dispute demonstrated by experience, government not only positively refused to make the smallest abatement from, or change in their suicidal policy, but in every instance declined to give the slightest assistance to the persons ruined by, or suffering under it.

To us, reflecting on the causes to which this extraordinary and unprecedented conduct on the part of government is to be imputed, it appears that it can only be accounted for from two causes, to the combined operation of which the present distressed condition and recent danger of the British empire are entirely to be ascribed.

The first of these is the fatal and still undiminished influence of the political economists in the legislature. So great and disastrous has it been, that we do not hesitate to say, that we regard that sect as the worst enemies the empire ever had. What has made them so disastrous to the best interests of their country is, that they have introduced the custom of looking upon the science of government, not as a matter to be based upon experience, modified by its lessons, but as consisting of theories to be determined entirely by general reasonings, and considered to depend solely on the conclusions of philosophers, in works of abstract thought. They have thus come to disregard altogether the sufferings of nations or classes of society under their systems, and to adhere to them obstinately in the midst of general ruin and lamentation, as Dr Sangrado did to his bleedings and hot-water cure, though they had occasioned more funerals than the siege of Troy? They look upon a nation as the surgeon does upon a patient who is held down on the marble table to undergo an operations. This was just the case with Turgot – one of the first and most eminent of the economists, and who began the French Revolution by introducing their doctrines into French legislation. "He regarded," says Senac de Meilhan, "the body corporate not as a living and sentient, but as a lifeless and insensible substance, and operated upon it with as little hesitation as an anatomist does on a dead body." Beyond all doubt it was the suffering produced by the contraction of the currency from 1826 to 1830 that brought about the storm of discontent which issued in the Reform Bill. And if the empire is to be further revolutionised, and the Chartist agitation is to end in household or five-pound suffrage, it will unquestionably be owing to the wide-spread misery which the combined operation of free-trade and a fettered currency have extended through the empire.

The second cause to which this strange insensibility of government to the evidence of facts, and the sufferings of the empire, is to be ascribed, is the influence in the legislature of that very class which was installed in power by the revolution of 1832. The movement in that year was essentially democratic – it was by the effort of the masses, joined to that of the middle classes and the Whig aristocracy, that the crown was overawed, and the change forced upon the country. But the change actually made was in the interest and for the benefit of one of these parties only. The shopkeepers, by the framing of the Reform Act, got the government into their own hands. By schedules A and B, the colonies and shipping interest were at once disfranchised; by the ten-pound clause, the majority of votes in the urban constituencies was vested in the shopkeepers; by the places enfranchised, two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons were for towns and boroughs. Thus the majority, both of the seats and the constituents, was put into the hands of the trading classes. Thence all the changes which have since taken place in our national policy. The practised leaders of parliament soon discovered where power was now practically vested, – they are as quick at finding out that as courtiers are at finding out who are the favourites that influence the sovereign. Thence the free-trade measures, and the obstinate retention of a contracted currency. It is for the interest of capitalists to lower the price of every thing except money, and render it as dear as possible; it is for the interest of the retailer and merchant to buy cheap and sell dear. Thence the free-trade system and contracted currency, which have now spread such unheard-of devastation throughout the empire. When a class obtains the ascendency in government, it becomes wholly inexorable, and deaf to every consideration of justice or expedience urged by any other class. Of such class government may be said, what Thurlow, with his usual wit and sagacity, said to a suitor who was complaining of the denial of justice he had experienced from an incorporation, – "Justice, Sir! did you ever expect justice from an incorporation? which has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked."

It is no doubt true that a large proportion of the persons who have suffered under the system introduced into our colonies, have been the very commercial and manufacturing class who have imposed it upon government. The manufacturing operatives joined the shopkeepers in the cry for free-trade, – and where has it left numbers of them? – in the workhouse and the Gazette. But that is no uncommon thing in human affairs; perhaps the greatest evils which befall both nations and individuals are those which they bring upon themselves by their own folly or grasping disposition. Providence has a sure mode of punishing the selfishness of man, which is to let it work out its natural fruits. If the deserved retribution to selfish and interested conduct were to be taken out of human affairs, how much misery would be avoided here below, but what impunity would exist to crime!

The working classes in the manufacturing districts, who now see how entirely they have been deluded on this subject, and how completely free-trade has turned to their own ruin, have a very simple remedy for the evils under which they labour. They say, "Extend the suffrage; give us a due sway in the legislature, and we will soon protect our own interests. The revolution of 1832 in Great Britain, and that of 1830 in France, has turned entirely to the advantage of the bourgeoisie; and we must have another Reform Bill to give us the blessings which Louis Blanc, Ledru Rollin, and the Socialists promise to France." This idea has taken a great hold of the public mind in a certain class of society. It is the natural reaction of experience against the innumerable evils which free-trade and a contracted currency have brought upon the country. The manufacturing and working classes, who joined the trading interest in raising the cry for these measures, finding themselves now crushed, or deriving no benefit from their effects, see no remedy but in taking the matter entirely into their own hands, and putting an end at once, by obtaining the command of the House of Commons, to all those measures which gratuitously, and for no conceivable purpose but the interest of the trades, spread ruin and desolation through the nation.

We object strenuously to any such change; and that from no attachment to the free-trade and fettered currency system, to which we have always given the most determined resistance, but from a firm desire for, and clear perception of, the interests of the great body of the people, to which, though often in opposition to their blind and mistaken wishes, we have uniformly given the most undeviating support.

A uniform system of voting, such as a £5 or household suffrage, which is now proposed as a remedy for all the evils of society, is of necessity a class representation, and the class to which it gives the ascendency is the lowest in whom the suffrage is vested. It must be so, because the poor being always and in every country much more numerous than the rich, the humblest class of voters under every uniform system must always be incomparably the most numerous. It is this circumstance which has given the ten-pounders the command of the House of Commons under the new constitution; they are the humblest and therefore the most numerous class enfranchised by the Reform Act, and consequently, under the uniform household suffrage, they have the majority. They have so for the same reason that, under a similar uniform system, the privates in an army would outnumber the whole officers, commissioned and non-commissioned. But if the suffrage is reduced so low as to admit the representatives of the operatives and "proletaires," or those whom they influence, (which household or a £5 suffrage would undoubtedly do,) what measures in the present state of society in this country, and feeling throughout the world, would they immediately adopt? We have only to look at the newly formed republic of France, where such a system is established, to receive the answer. Repudiation of state engagements, (as in the case of the railways;) confiscation of property under the name of a graduated income tax; the abolition of primogeniture, in order to ruin the landed interest; the issue of assignats, in order to sustain the state under the shock to credit which such measures would necessarily occasion, might with confidence be looked for. And the question to be considered is, would these measures in the end benefit any class of society, or, least of all, the operative, in a country such as Great Britain, containing, in proportion to its population, a greater number of persons dependent on daily wages for their existence than any other that ever existed?

What is to be expected from such ruin to credit and capital but the immediate stoppage of employment, and throwing of millions out of bread? Even if the whole land in the country were seized and divided, it would afford no general relief – it would only shift the suffering from one class to another. What, under such a system, would become of the millions who now exist on the surplus expenditure of the wealthy? They would all be ruined – England would be overrun by a host of starving cultivators like France or Ireland. A plunge down to household suffrage would soon effect the work of destruction, by reducing us all in a few years to the condition of Irish bog-trotters. It is no security against these dangers to say that the working class, if they get the majority, will take care of themselves, and eschew whatever is hurtful to their interests. Men do not know what is to prove ultimately injurious in public, any more than they perceive, in most cases, what is to be for their final interest in private life. The bourgeoisie got the command of the country in France by the Revolution of 1830, but have they benefited by the change? Let the enormous expenditure of Louis Philippe's government, and the present disastrous state of commerce in France, give the answer. The workmen of Paris got the entire command of the government by the Revolution of 1848, and already 85,000 of them are kept alive, only working at the "Ateliers Nationaux," while 200,000 are lounging about, eating up the country with bayonets in their hands. The middle classes got the command of Great Britain by the Reform Act, and their representatives set about free-trade and restricted currency measures, which have spread distress and bankruptcy to an unparalleled extent among themselves. The Reform Bill, by establishing these measures, has destroyed a fourth of the realised capital of Great Britain.8 Household or universal suffrage would at once sweep away a half of what remains, as it has recently done in France. And in what condition would the 30,000,000 inhabitants of the British empire be if three-fourths of the capital – in other words, three-fourths of the means of employing labour, or purchasing its fruits – were destroyed? We should have Skibbereens in every village of Great Britain, and grass growing in half of London.