Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 386, December, 1847

The truth is, so long as we proclaim ourselves the gold-bankers of the world, and make perpetual boast of the hoards which we have from time to time accumulated, we shall never be safe against a money drain from England. We cannot force foreigners to take our British manufactures; the demand, as we said before, is precarious, and we cannot go on making calicoes and cottons for ever at a loss. In exchange for extended imports, two things may be taken, goods or specie, and with the prospect of lower prices to come, the foreigner will always choose the latter. Hence, in a great measure, arose the drain of bullion, which was sent to America. We were at that time in want not only of corn, but of cotton, and a supply of the latter material was indispensably necessary to keep the factories open. In ordinary times, no doubt, the American would have taken goods in exchange, but in the then posture of affairs, he saw the subsequent advantage which he must derive by carrying away her bullion from England, without decreasing her stock, for, as a natural consequence, that stock must sorely depreciate in value. And it is not until we can get rid of our ready manufactured stores, at whatever sacrifice, that we shall again recover that precious basis of our currency, which we cling to with the most doting affection, and for the sake of which we are content every few years to undergo a national convulsion.

Such being the state of our exports under the operation of free trade, let us now look a little to the other side of the balance sheet. The duties levied at the custom-houses constitute, as every one knows, the largest portion of our revenue, and therefore cannot be made the subject of experiment, without extreme risk of defalcation. We have already shown that, although, upon the whole, our imports have risen, the gain has exclusively proceeded from that portion of imports upon which the duty has not been reduced, and that wherever we have lost any thing, it has been through the attempt to approximate to free trade. The experiment, however, has already been made upon a large scale; it has cost us many millions, and the odious income tax remains as a tangible proof of its failure. It was, according to Sir Robert Peel, the sure method of commanding reciprocity from the foreigner, and of extending our exports largely. Neither result has followed; we are as far from reciprocity as ever, and the exports have seriously decreased.

It is necessary also that we should remark what kind of articles have been selected for the late experiment, because some, although not all, of our import duties are framed with a view to protection as well as for revenue purposes. For example, no one will dispute that we have a great interest in procuring such raw materials as cotton and silk for our manufactures as cheap as possible, because we cannot produce those articles at home, and our success depends upon their reproduction in the shape of fabrics. Here then there is no question of competition, apart from colonial interests, and we do right to throw no obstacle in the way of their introduction. But the admission of manufactured articles, either of silk or of cotton, at so low a rate of duty as to encourage the foreigner to compete with us in the home market, is a totally different matter. It is a blow to native industry of the worst and most insidious description, and cannot be justified even on the ground that the cheapness thereby induced is a recompense to the agricultural portion of the community for the sweeping measures which abrogated not only the grain duties, but those which were formerly imposed upon all kinds of foreign provisions. The agriculturists of Britain, from the landlord to the peasant, desire no such recompense. They do not wish that in addition to the hardships which they themselves have sustained, other classes of the community should be doomed to suffer; they do not wish that the wages of the manufacturing operative should be reduced in order that French silks and velvets and millinery may be brought in to inundate the market; and they will be no parties to any scheme for the depression of our national labour. It may suit Sir Robert Peel and the Whigs to hold up cheapness as the great desideratum of commercial legislation, but our creed, is otherwise: we protest against the tariff of 1846, as injurious to the revenue, as hostile to home industry, and as an engine of destruction to the already over-taxed and over-burdened artisan. Let us extract from the tariffs of the last two years some instances of this unnatural policy: —

and so on, ad infinitum.

What is this, we ask, but a direct invitation to the foreigner to step in and undersell us in our market? We are told, and we believe it to be true, that the revenue has been augmented in several of the above instances by the reduction of the duty; if so, the announcement should be received with any thing but feelings of exultation. There is the bread taken from the mouths of very many thousands of our industrial classes, in order that we may indulge to our heart's content in foreign finery and gewgaws! Not one article of reduction in the above list, but has been made at the expense of the life-blood of our fellow-subjects: not one duty removed without a permanent addition to the workhouse. We shall give but one instance to show how such alterations work even in the smallest cases.

The manufacture of straw-plait is, and has been for many years, one of the principal branches of industry practised in the Orkney islands. During the long winter nights in that stormy region, when almost every other occupation is suspended, the women are occupied with this work, from which they have hitherto derived a small but a certain profit. Sir Robert Peel, sitting at his ease in Whitehall, esteems straw-plait an article of no consideration; and in revising his tariff, with a view to temporary popularity, he strikes off one-third of the existing import duty, being half-a-crown per pound, and the peasantry of Normandy and Baden come in to supplant the unfortunate Orcadians! The youngest of us must recollect the distress which has frequently prevailed amongst the silk-weavers of Spitalfields, even under a protecting tariff, and the attempts which have repeatedly been made by Royalty itself, and by good Queen Adelaide in particular, to set the fashion and revive the taste for home manufactures. Was this attempt a wrong one? It would seem so, for the soul of Sir Robert Peel is set upon French brocades. The millinery of Paris is in the ascendant, and there is no longer any need for searching female smugglers at the custom-house. We are invited to wear French cravats, waistcoats, hats, handkerchiefs, boots, and gloves, all procurable at a cheaper rate than they can possibly be manufactured at home, and very few of us have sufficient patriotism to decline the advantage. Our ladies have their dresses sent ready-made from the capital of France, or if they still adhere to the native milliner, or the artiste who is a naturalised French-woman, the materials, fresh from Lyons or Marseilles, are invariably purchased at these huge emporiums in Regent Street and Bond Street, which you may search in vain for a specimen of British industry. The walls of our houses are covered with French fancy papers, brought down to a nominal price, with which the home producer cannot compete. Or molu clocks, and ornaments of French, German, and Bohemian glass are on every chimney-piece and table. Some articles of foreign cutlery are sold in Birmingham and Sheffield for about one-half of the price at which they can be manufactured in those towns; and the woollen productions of Saxony are competing with the staple of Yorkshire. These are the blessings of what is called free trade, though free trade, in the full sense of the word, is a manifest delusion and impossibility. We, the inhabitants of the highest-taxed country of the world, have essayed the adventure of opening our ports to the products of other nations – if not altogether, at least in such a degree as to invite and stimulate competition; we have done so without asking reciprocity, and without finding it, in the mere vague hope that our exports might be doubled in return; and the result is, that our own labourers and artisans are swamped in the home market, and that our exports are lamentably decreased.

And, in the mean time, what is to become of our people, whom free trade is reducing to pauperism? The political economist, whose heart is as hard as the machinery he drives, will scarcely pause for a moment to answer so trivial a question. His ultimatum is, the factory, the workhouse, or emigration. But unfortunately the factory doors are not wide enough to admit all comers. Even now the mills of Lanarkshire and of Lancashire are on short time, and we cannot predict the quarter from which an augmented demand is to arise. Apart altogether from humanity, the workhouse is an expensive establishment for those who must maintain it, and the blessing of the Almighty will not rest with the nation which has so little regard for its poor. There remains then only emigration, whereof we have already some specimen. Whilst we are writing, the subjoined paragraph is going the round of the public press: —

"French Manufacturers and Scotch Manufacturers. – The following paragraph, from the Paris Moniteur, is not without some significance at the present time: —

'The steamer Finisterre landed, a few days ago, at Morlaix, thirty-eight Scotchwomen, who are to be employed in the spinning-mill of Landernau, which is to commence operations at the close of the month. The Morlaisien is to convey a similar number at her next trip. These women, who are intended to form the nucleus of the Flax-Spinning Company of Finisterre, will be lodged and fed together in a building constructed for that special purpose. Most of them are young, very neatly dressed, and all wear bonnets after the English fashion. Their countenances exhibited the satisfaction they experienced at having arrived in a country where they were certain to find employment and means of existence.'"

Alas! it is but too true. Let free trade continue to progress, and it is only amidst aliens, and far from their native soil, that the children of our poor can hope to find a refuge. What a tale of shattered hopes, of breaking hearts, and of domestic misery may be read in these few simple, sentences! Can Britain hope to be prosperous whilst such is the condition of her daughters?

From the position so imprudently occupied we must perforce recede, but we hope that the reasons for, and manner of doing so, will be distinctly marked in Parliament by some clear and unequivocal resolutions.

We have tried free trade, and it has failed. The specious promises of Sir Robert Peel have proved utterly delusive, and his disciples cannot point to one instance in which his anticipations have been realised. The question at present is, are we to try the experiment further? If we are to do so, it must be at the cost of a prolonged period of misery, with very little prospect and no certainty of an ultimate escape. The revenue has fallen off: that at least is certain and beyond cavil, and we presume that a sweeping property and income tax is the only remedy which Lord John Russell or his Chancellor of the Exchequer will propose. The imports of daily consumpt have prodigiously increased, in consequence of our altered tariffs, and must be paid for; whilst, on the other hand, the exports, which are the means of payment, are decreasing in a corresponding ratio. And should we be told that this decrease is merely temporary, and that a large demand for our manufactures must infallibly arise from abroad, we shall merely ask our opponents in what way that demand is to be supplied? The table of the imports of raw material which we have given above, speaks volumes as to the state of our industry. Cotton, wool, flax, hemp – all the products which kept the mills, not of one district, but of all the districts of this mighty empire, in motion, have, since the introduction of free trade, arrived in alarmingly diminished quantities, and extended export is an impossibility, because we have not got the material to keep our home machinery in motion.

These are not speculations, but facts: and it is very much to be hoped that honest men of the free trade party will lay them earnestly to heart, and endeavour to retrieve the error into which they have been led by an over-sanguine estimate of our own powers, and a far too generous view of the commercial policy which influences the other nations of the world. The decline of our commerce is also inseparably connected with our mischievous currency laws. That an immediate reform of the latter is absolutely necessary, is quite clear from the monetary history of the last few months. We must adopt some system which shall maintain legitimate credit, and allow property at all times to command its commercial representative emblem at a fair rate, without subjecting the person who requires it to a worse than Israelitish rate of usury. Which of us is there in the country, one class alone excepted, who has not felt the pressure of the times? Is it a light matter, either to the landowner or the manufacturer or the merchant, that money should be driven up to its present exorbitant rate, and so maintained simply that the capitalist may step in, and reap an undue profit from the artificial and not the real necessities of the others? This is the motive which lies at the bottom of all the views of the bullionists. They know very well that perfect convertibility is a dream, but they try to keep up the semblance of it so far as they can, and the absurd and complicated machinery of the Bank of England was constructed for no other purpose. The public have been gulled by specious declamation about security, and when the crisis arrives, they find that they have got no security at all.

This state of things cannot be allowed to continue. If our exports are ever to revive – nay, if they are merely to continue at their present ebb without further declension – money must be made procurable at something like an easy rate. We cannot, and we will not permit the resources of the whole nation to fall a sacrifice to the insatiable avarice of the capitalist. We must not starve our population to allow him an exorbitant bargain. In the opinion of many we have already weathered the worst of the storm, and may prepare for a new career, though necessarily on a contracted scale. Certainly, if any thing could give us confidence, it is the knowledge of the fact that the mischievous monetary law is in abeyance, and we hardly think that, with the sight of the recent wreck which it has caused before our eyes, there is any chance of its remaining longer on the statute-book unrepealed. The very lowness of the ebb to which prices have been brought is a sort of guarantee of their revival; and although we have much to do, and perchance not a little to suffer, before we can regain the position which we once occupied, there is, at all events, some prospect of an advance. That, however, can only be gradual, and must depend upon our abandonment of theories, our renunciation of false guides, and our return to honest, humane, and intelligible principles. In the event of any temporary prosperity, it will be well to recollect that we owe the amendment neither to Sir Robert Peel nor to the Whigs. The former brought us into our difficulties; the latter did their best to keep us there, and yielded at the last moment with undeniably bad grace when matters were at the verge of desperation, and when no man could trust his neighbour. Warned by experience, it will be the duty of parliament, if it is wise, to apply itself diligently to the task, not of rash reform, but of wise remodelment. On many matters of the utmost financial importance there is little difference of opinion between the leaders of the country party and the representatives of large manufacturing constituencies. Peel and his few supporters, backed by the present ministry, stand isolated in their adherence to positions – it would be absurd to call them principles – which have been tried and found wanting in the balance. Except these, and unhappy Mr Jones Loyd, who stands forth in the midst of the group as the great hierophant of Mammon, there are few hardy enough to raise their voices in defence of arbitrary Bank restriction. It is clear to every thinking man, that extended operations require an extended currency; and that, as we cannot force gold into the country – for, after all, the supply of that commodity is by no means limitless – except at a ruinous loss, we must adopt the principle already sufficiently recognised and tested, and make good the deficiency with paper. This might be done either by the resumption of a one pound note circulation in England, or by an issue of national paper to the amount of our ordinary taxation; or, better still, by setting banking free, and permitting the joint-stock companies to issue notes in proportion to the amount of national securities lodged by them in the hands of government Commissioners. At any rate, we do hope that so far as Scotland and Ireland are concerned, they may be allowed once more to resume the control of their own monetary matters, and be relieved from those golden chains which are not only cumbersome to them, but, as we have shown, are seriously detrimental to England, by locking up in time of need a large portion of her established currency. With regard to the public works now in progress, we deprecate rash interference. It is not likely, nor is it at all desirable that for some time to come, any new schemes of magnitude will be proposed: let us then apply ourselves seriously to finish what we have begun, and without calling new labour into existence, let us husband our employment for the old. A new element of danger and distress has been introduced by the dismissal of many thousands of the workmen from unfinished lines, owing to the tightness of the money market, and the impossibility of procuring loans. This must be looked to immediately. These men have a right to their employment, for they have been called forth from their other avocations by the sanction of Parliament, and neither good faith nor public policy will admit of their abandonment at present. Above all, let us look to the tariff, and, dismissing from our minds the delusions of free trade and the dreams of future reciprocity, let us stand forth manfully in defence of the rights of labour, and of that native industry which is the true source of our country's greatness and renown. It will not do for the rich to go flaunting in foreign manufacture and apparel, while the operative is starving at home with the doors of the factories closed. We must not fill our palaces and our homes with articles of continental manufacture, whilst British skill is left to languish unpatronised and unemployed. If we must have those things, let us pay for them at a rate which will leave to our own workmen the ordinary chances of competition, and we have no fear whatever of the result. If we make a national profit by the depression of industry at home, we are buying it with the tears, and the misery, and the curses of thousands of the poor; if, on the contrary, we make no profit by the sacrifice, we are wantonly betraying ourselves. Let us then be wise in time. We have tried the effects of quack experiments upon our monetary and commercial systems, and both of them have given way. Let us have no more such; but let men of all parties, who are true and honest in their opinions, unite together in putting an end to the disorders in our social economy. The new Parliament ere these pages can issue from the press will be convened, and the prosperity of the country rests in a great measure in their hands. We shall await the issue of their deliberations upon these momentous matters with much anxiety, some apprehension, but withal a large admixture of hope. For although parties at first sight appear to be more than commonly disorganised, the late discussions which have arisen in consequence of our unfortunate embarrassments have effected a mighty change in the sentiments and language of many. Men who were formerly held to represent opinions of conflicting tendency, have been forced into juxtaposition, and have discovered that their differences were far more nominal than otherwise; and we cannot but hope that all such will work together cordially and conscientiously, and apart from faction, in placing both our systems, monetary and commercial, upon a firm and permanent basis. Be this as it may, we are at least assured that the members of the country party, undismayed by defeat or by desertion, will be, as ever, at their posts, and will justify, by their maintenance and advocacy of sound national principles, the confidence which has been unhesitatingly accorded to them by an important section, of the people.

END OF VOL. LXII

1

Essays. By Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature, an Essay, and Orations. By the same.

2

Memoirs of Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel.

3

Die Pyrenäen. Von Eugen Baron Vaerst. Zwei Bände: Breslau, 1847.

4

Marliani, Histoire Politique de l'Espagne Moderne, ii. 440.

5

El santo zancarron, (literally, the holy dry bone,) an expression handed down from the Moors, and very dangerous to be used for some time after their expulsion, when an oath "by Mahomet" sufficed to make the utterer suspected by the Inquisition of addiction to the forbidden faith. It was to escape all suspicion of such addiction that the Spaniards became great consumers of pig's flesh, still a standard dish, in one form or other, at every Spanish dinner. Probably it was the excellent quality of Spanish pork, as much as the fear of the Inquisition, that perpetuated this custom.

6

"I would much rather be a keeper of lions than have charge of Biscayans."

7

Marliani, ii. 317.

8

See Thucyd. i. 143, and Xenoph. de Repub. Ath. i. 19.

9

See the remarkable passage in Herodotus (Terpsichore, 78) where he describes the change in the spirit of the Athenians after they had got rid of the yoke of the Pisistratidæ, and felt the full vigour of the free institutions which Cleisthenes had perfected for them.

10

Scott's Life of Napoleon.

11

History of Greece, vol. iii. p. 26, n.

12

Plutarch in Vitâ Lysandri.

13

Plutarch in Vitâ.

14

Herodotus Polyhymnia, 144.

15

See the speech of Pericles at the end of the first book of Thucydides, and also the great speech in the second book.

16

Thucyd., iv. 10.

17

Speech of Phormio to his crews before the second battle in the Gulf. – Thucyd. ii. 89.

18

Herod., Urania, 90.

19

The Paralus was the name of one of the two sacred galleys, which the Athenians employed for the conveyance of despatches, and state missions; and which were always equipped and manned with the greatest care. It is not specified in Thucydides that the Paralus was one of Phormio's galleys; but from the brilliant exploits of his squadron in this and a subsequent battle, we may fairly suppose it to have been composed of the Elite of the Athenian navy.