for money.

Period of the Stuarts.

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No one, therefore, who saw tradesmen making these great returns, which all traffic then afforded, would give a heavy rental for land. Lands consequently were let low, and on long leases, the competition for farms being moderate."

Some of Mr. Doubleday's readers will probably doubt the extreme prosperity of a country where interest is at six and eight per cent., and the profits (and, perhaps, we should interpolate for him, the risks) of trade in proportion. They may opine that for the few fortunate owners of capital, and for the tradesmen exempt from all competition, there may have been great and undue gains, at the expense and to the detriment of the mass of the inhabitants. Another source of satisfactory contemplation is the state of the poor. "Rates," continues he, "distributed liberally, if not profusely, came to £160,000, only th of the revenue." Very possibly, with no debt, little naval or military force, whatever we spent on the poor might wear a totally different aspect, when compared with the revenue and expenditure of the present day. To judge correctly, however, of the relative burden of pauperism at any period, it should be ascertained with what proportion of food the population of a country has to tax itself, for the support of those of its members who cannot maintain themselves at either period.

During the four years of King James's reign, wheat, on an average, cost 31s. 7d. per quarter. £160,000, therefore, expended in poor rates, were equal to 101,320 quarters, or 810,560 bushels; and assuming the population at that period at from 4,500,000 to 5,000,000, the amount of relief to the indigent required a contribution from every individual in the State of from 4th to th of a bushel.

The poor rate now may be taken at £5,000,000, and with wheat at 60s., will amount to about one bushel per head, or six or seven times as much per head, on our present population, (in spite of Mr. Doubleday's " atrocious Poor Law,") as the "liberal if not profuse administration" in the Stuart period.

It is difficult to believe that this gentleman has properly examined the social condition of the lower classes of this country before making such loose statements. From 1660 to 1720, says Malthus, the average price of corn enabled a labourer to purchase two-thirds of a peck of wheat per diem with his daily wagesfrom 1720 to 1750 they were equal to a peck a day. Arthur Young considers that for the whole of the 17th century, wheat averaged 38s. 2d., and that from 1700 to 1766 it was 32s. 1d.; that is, it declined 16 per cent., while labour, which on the average had been 101d. per diem through the 17th century, was for the 66 first years of the 18th-1s., or a rise of 16 per cent., to which we will add the general testimony of Mr.

Hallam, that "the reign of Geo. II. was on the whole the most prosperous period that England had ever experienced." In 1668 (i. e. in Mr. D.'s happy times), Gregory King computed the ordinary revenue of labourers and out-servants at £15 per annum for a family of 33 persons, their weekly expenditure at 20d. per head-here is an income of £15 to meet an expenditure then of £17, 15s. Chief Justice Hale seems to have reckoned the expense of a labourer's family, consisting of a father, mother, and four children, of whom two could work a little, and the other two not at all, at 10s. per week, or £26 per annum. we assume 8s. per week as their income from earnings, we have but £20, 16s. From 1655 to 1680, the period with which the Chief Justice was familiar, the average price of wheat was from two guineas to 45s. the quarter.

If

It will be clear, from these authorities, that Mr. D., in his anxiety to render yet more an object of envy to his fellow debtors of this century, the golden age of prerogative and plague, has assumed for it a degree of comfort and prosperity wholly at variance with historical facts. There is also an infatuation similar to that which characterized his theory of population, in asserting that this island was far more numerously peopled in former times than under the Tudors and the Stuarts. They seem to have lived, in his view, mostly on animal food; "up to the Reformation farming was in fact grazing." If so, these graziers and their herdsmen must have been, we grieve to think, but indifferent Catholics, not quite worthy of the advantages that surrounded them :-we own we should have thought the effect of the Reformation, involving the abolition of Lenten days, would have inverted the relative consumption, and have caused less corn and more meat to be consumed than before.

These praises, however, enable him with better grace to denounce the present order of things. Our condition is become so intolerable, that he gravely proposes the disregard of obligations contracted and imposed by the Legislature, to pass a sponge over the whole national debt, as Cobbett, of whom he is an admirer, did a quarter of a century back. Whether we will or not, this proceeding, we are told, is inevitable; only for convenience sake it might, he thinks, be hastened. He cannot forgive Sir Robert Peel for the share he had in the Act of 1819. The hardship and injustice which it inflicted fell, as he states, in the first instance, and with the greatest severity, upon mortgagers and incumbrancers, but all other classes of our tax-paying countrymen were in effect mulcted, by the undesigned or unforeseen operation of this Act, of £3,000,000 to £4,000,000 annually. By it they were decreed to pay in gold the interest of all that part of the debt borrowed in the war time in a

depreciated currency, and which interest, nominally above £12,000,000, was really worth only eight or nine millions until the Act of 1819 added to all obligations of this sort a burden of 20 to 25 per cent., by converting a paper promise into a golden liability.

"The distress, ruin, and bankruptcy which now took place were universal, affecting both the great interests of land and trade; but among the landlords whose estates were burdened with mortgages, fortunes, settlements, legacies, &c., the effects were most marked and out of the ordinary course. In hundreds of cases, from the tremendous reduction in the price of land which now took place, the estates barely sold for as much as would pay off their mortgages, and hence the owners were stripped of all, and made beggars."

In one case given, a gentleman purchases an estate for £80,000, about 1812 or 1813--one moiety of the purchase being borrowed on mortgage of the land so bought.

"In 1823 he was compelled to part with the estate, in order to pay off his mortgage and some arrears of interest, and when this was done, he was left without a shilling-the estate bringing only half its cost in 1812."

In another case, about 1812, a father and son had invested in an estate in a midland county the sum of £72,000; shortly after they agreed to lay out an equal sum on another estate in the same quarter. In the interval between the contract for the purchase (1812) and the execution of the conveyance (in 1819), the parties, who were in trade, and who had experienced heavy losses, could not complete the purchase, which, with some arrears of unpaid interest, amounted to £71,957; they therefore gave the vender (in addition to £18,555 which he had already received in part payment) a mortgage deed for £65,000 secured on both of the estates. In 1821 the purchasers became bankrupts

these two estates were then put up for sale, but would not together bring the sum for which they were mortgaged, and the vender of the second, now become the mortgagee of both, gave notice to foreclose. And this sad tale was that of many, whatever may have been the mismanagement or indiscretion of the parties thus speculating in land and trade also; yet the depreciation of the land in each case to half its value in less than a dozen years, is undeniable. It resulted from the lottery in which the nation had been engaged-not from any particular criminality on the part of the Government. An excess of speculation had pervaded all orders of men in the country. We had been the sole traders, the sole carriers and manufacturers; and it was not surprising that speculations in land should have partaken of the general artificial rise, and should afterwards have reached their natural level by a rapid and ruinous descent.

He forcibly denounces the practice of saddling our posterity to all perpetuity with the debts contracted in a single generation. There is a curious letter from Jefferson to Dr. Epps, dated 24th June 1813, in support of this view:

"Suppose that the majority had borrowed a sum equal to the feesimple of the estate, and had consumed it in eating and drinking and making merry in their day, or, if you please, in quarrelling and fighting with their unoffending neighbours-in eighteen years and eight months half of the then adult majority are dead; till then, being the majority, they might rightfully levy the interest of their debt annually on themselves and their fellow-citizens;—but at that period a new majority will have come into place in their own right, and not under the rights, conditions, and laws of their predecessors: Are they bound to consider the debt? or legally bound to give up their country and emigrate for subsistence? Every one will say-No.”*

Mr. Doubleday raises only a refined objection to this passage, to the effect that there might have been minors, wanting only a few days of legal age, who might thus be bound for nearly nineteen years to a system which they might disapprove of, and to which they ought not to be subjected per force when of age to assert their other political rights.

Men do not, however, always on coming of age, enter upon the exercise of discretion, or indeed upon the possession of an unencumbered estate, real or political; and if they do, they are not long before they manage to encumber it a little themselves. We wonder that Mr. Doubleday's extreme anxiety to preserve all possible contingent remainders for the first tenant in tail, did not suggest to him that the minor is not the only sufferer. Is there no hardship in shutting out those who, by the census, are now just below the property qualification, but who may acquire it to-morrow, as those who to-day are just below the age qualification, which will avail them only to-morrow, when it is too late, and when the mortgage-deed upon their future toil will have been already executed?

However, the extreme cases put by Jefferson cannot practically occur. No capitalist would advance money to a State, for the exclusive object of promoting national gluttony and ebriety, though a single prodigal son is sometimes enabled, by the aid of money-lenders, to waste his family substance in this manner. The want of credit on the part of the spendthrift governments of France, for a generation or two, led to the convocation of the

* Jefferson's theory was, that of all now living one-half die in twenty-four years and eight months; but then he omits minors, and says, that of those now adult, one-half will be dead in eighteen years and eight months

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States-General, and eventually to the Revolution; and with regard to the expending of borrowed money in quarrelling with neighbours, it is yet to be seen whether Mr. Jefferson's countrymen, in their contest with Mexico, will be able to borrow the funds requisite for its successful termination, and whether the interest will in that case continue to be paid punctually, even for eighteen years and eight months.

Again it is argued, as if it lay in the discretion of the nobles of this country, for the time being, to have gone to war or not with France as they pleased, and to have spent as little money on this object as they chose. In Mr. Jefferson's country this might be the case, but not so in Europe. Could we have calculated on remaining neuter? was our engaging in the war, or our continuance of it, voluntary or not? We will admit that the first declaration came from us; nay more-that the tenor of Lord Grenville's notes were unfriendly in 1792. But had statesmen most desirous of peace been at the head of affairs-had Mr. Fox, for instance, the apologist of the French Revolution, been at the helm from 1792 to 1805, could even he have prevented war? Had we not acted against the French on the ocean, we must have fought them in Egypt; and if not in Egypt, at last in India, where they would, but for our timely stoppage, have gone. Did other States, desirous of peace or neutrality, avert the visitation? Did Naples, or Bavaria, or Spain, or Tuscany, or Modena, or Venice, or Genoa, or even Prussia, though there was no measure of humility, falsehood, or treachery, that the cabinet of this latter power were not ready to resort to, in order to escape the ultima ratio familiar to the great Frederick? And we are now to be told that it was optional whether we should fight!

Until lately, it has been doubted whether the project of an invasion of this country was seriously entertained. It has been supposed that the French ruler knew our unconquerable character, and was glad of an excuse to be quit of the expedition. So he may; a closer examination may have shown him the probabilities of failure and disgrace; but do not let us therefore conclude, that the project had not been seriously entertained, and long and obstinately persevered in by its author. M. Thiers' fifth volume shows the extent of preparations made the ports dug out along the French coast-the flotillas of brigs, gunboats, and transports provided-the enormous expenses incurred with this sole view-expenses seriously taxing the resources of the nation, and entirely thrown away unless this enterprise was undertaken. Let it be seen what earnest personal interest the Emperor himself took in this matter for years, urging, cajoling, forcing every agent, officer, and circumstance, into his views.