them when the price fell, and it was evident that the necessity for an extended paper circulation was passing away.
Of course it would be necessary, under such a system, to impose some limit to the obligation of the Bank of England to pay in specie; but this might be done either by obliging that establishment to pay in either of those metals at the current price they bore in the market at the date of presentment, or by providing, that beyond a certain amount of notes payable on demand, as £40,000,000 for Great Britain, and Ireland, notes of a different colour, as red, should be issued, which were exchangeable for specie only when the precious metals had again fallen to a certain price in the market. These notes should be issued when gold rises to a certain price, and is evidently leaving the country – just as grain from government stores should be issued to the people in periods of scarcity – and drawn in when it returns, and the price falls. We throw these out only as crude suggestions, which may or may not be adequate to answer the purpose in view. What we rest upon, and press in the most earnest manner upon the consideration of the country, is the absolute necessity of altering the present system of contracting the paper when the gold is taken away – in other words, limiting the issues of bread when the beef fails– and substituting for it one of extending the issue of paper when the precious metals are withdrawn; in other words, increasing the issues of bread when those of beef have become deficient.
The next measure which appears indispensable to secure internal tranquillity in the empire is, to make a very considerable government grant, to enable the railway companies to complete the principal lines now on foot, but still in an unfinished state. Every consideration of justice, expedience, and necessity, calls for such a grant. Many of these railways can be completed in no other way. Their directors have already borrowed all the money on the security of the undertaking which the law allows (a third;) and the diminished means and straitened credit of the shareholders, for the present at least, has disabled them from answering any further calls. The works must stand still, a deformity and a disgrace to the country, if government relief is not afforded. Parliament has declared the expedience of these lines by having passed the bills for their formation. Most, perhaps all, of these would have been completed ere this, had not the fetters imposed on the currency by the Bank Charter Act so straitened credit that it has become impossible. The very name of government being willing to advance a certain sum, as two or three millions, to enable these companies to resume their work, would so restore and vivify credit, that it is probable a very small part of the sum voted would be taken up by these undertakings. The restoration of private credit, by such a measure on the part of government, would unlock the immense coffers of wealth which now, from the prostration of private credit, lie unemployed in the country. For, such is the strange and anomalous condition in which we stand, that while our streets are crowded with thousands and hundreds of thousands of unemployed labourers and artisans seeking employment, our banks and insurance offices are crowded with thousands and hundreds of thousands of unemployed capital seeking investment. Yet these two superfluities cannot reach or relieve each other. Why? Because credit and currency are wanting to enable the one to pass over to the other. Let government lay the foundation of the bridge, and the communication, to mutual advantage, will soon be restored.
Incalculable is the benefit which such a resumption of these works would occasion, both to the individuals connected with, or employed by them, and the country at large. It would give bread at once to hundreds of thousands of unemployed labourers, who have been seduced from their regular avocations by the high wages offered two years ago on the lines, and now find return to their former employments impossible, from these having been filled up: it would thin the Chartist and household suffrage meetings, by stopping the distress which fills them, and giving the working classes something better to do than listening to intemperate and seditious speeches: it would render productive the capital and labour already expended on these undertakings, and give their directors the means both of paying a dividend to the proprietors, and liquidating, at no distant period, the whole debt borrowed from the state: it would assuage and relieve unbounded distress, both in the once wealthy and the labouring classes of the state: it would vivify and facilitate commerce, by opening up means of communication through districts requiring it, and to the formation of which the sanction of the legislature on that ground has been given; – but most of all, it would evince, by deeds more eloquent than words, the sympathy of government with the sufferings of the people, wrest from the agitators their strongest arguments against the constitution as it stands, and relieve government of the fearful imputation to which it is now exposed, of first having encouraged the nation to engage in vast and important internal measures, and then deprived them, by legislative enactments, of the means of carrying them, into complete execution.
A third step which is indispensable to disarm the Chartist agitation and restore internal confidence and peace to the country, is to provide on a great scale, and by government machinery, for the relief of the labour market. Various causes have now conspired to render this a matter of paramount necessity. In Ireland, the long-continued agitation for Repeal, coinciding with the indolent and improvident habits of the people, the desolating effects of the potato famine of 1846, and the enervating consequences of the noble government grant of £10,000,000 to meet its necessities, joined to the seditious and treasonable efforts of the insane Young Ireland party, have so completely paralysed industry, that the Emerald Isle may now be regarded as little more than a huge workshop of pauperism, a sort of officina pauperiei, from whence starving multitudes are incessantly issuing to deluge the adjoining states. The number of emigrants who left it for distant colonies in 1847 was above one hundred thousand, but that is but a small part of the dreadful stream of pauperism which incessantly pours forth from its still crowded shores. In the first nine months of 1847, the number of Irish who came to Glasgow was 49,981: and that number has since been on the increase, for, from the last report of the parochial board of Glasgow, it appears, that in five months and ten days preceding 25th April 1848, the number of Irish who landed in Glasgow was 42,288! This is at the rate of nearly 100,000 a-year; and these squalid immigrants, let it be recollected, come, to a country where labour has already, from the effects of free-trade and a fettered currency, and the disastrous stoppage to orders produced by the French and German revolutions, become a perfect drug in the market; and when in and around the single city of Glasgow, above 100,000 human beings, including dependants, are already out of work! Individual charity, local efforts, are nugatory against such prodigious masses of pauperism; you might as well have expected the staff of the Russian parishes to have resisted the invasion of 1812.
Perhaps there is nothing which has occurred, in our time, so much to be regretted, as that the noble grant of ten millions from Great Britain to relieve the distress of Ireland during the famine, was not, in part at least, devoted to the purposes of emigration. We all know how it was spent. No inconsiderable portion was absorbed by the never-failing frauds of the local Irish agents employed in its distribution, and the remainder in making good roads bad ones. No part was employed in a form which could reproduce itself. There was one thing, and but one, already good in Ireland, and that was the roads. On that one good thing the whole magnificent grant was wasted. Now half the grant, £5,000,000 sterling, would not only have provided 700,000 or 800,000 Irish with the means of crossing the Atlantic, but it would have transported them from the coast up the country to the frontier of the Forest. That is the great point which is never attended to by those who contend for free-trade in emigration; in other words, for liberty to transport the emigrants in crowded and crazy ships, half manned and ill provisioned, to the shores of America, and then leave them in sheds at the first harbour to starve or die of fever.
The advocates for free-trade in emigration forget that labour is as great a drug on the sea-coast of America as on the crowded shores of the Emerald Isle: it is no unusual thing to see five thousand emigrants, chiefly from Ireland, land at New York in a single day. But as much as labour is redundant in the American sea-port towns, it is scarce and in demand in the far west. Millions and tens of millions of unappropriated acres are there to be had for the asking; and an able-bodied man is sure to be instantly taken up at half-a-crown or three shillings a-day. The American papers say that "a stout European, with nothing in the world but his arms and his legs, if moved on to the far west, is worth a thousand dollars to the United States." He is worth more
