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notorious that agents of the government itself were, at that very moment, purchasing guineas at seven-and-twenty shillings in paper, in order to be sent to the English armies and fleets serving abroad. Our children will hardly believe this, unless there were the records of this house to refer to; and if by any accident they should be destroyed, the fire that consumes them will produce a conflagration to be hailed with delight by all those who have a regard for the honour of England.

118. The proposition of the bullion committee was, indeed, free from the charge of impudent falsehood; but of its folly it would be very difficult to produce an equal amongst all the wild schemes of hasty and shallow-minded men. The exportation of the precious metals which had been produced by substituting paper for gold and silver, had sent that large proportion of the whole of the specie of the civilized world; had sent that large share, which always must belong to a country so abundant in valuable things as England is; had sent that large share to be distributed amongst the other nations of the world. This caused prices to rise in all those other countries; but, the rise was still greater in England herself, because the paper cost nothing, and because there was not, and could not be, any check on the increase of its quantity. This rise in the price of commodities of every description,

and also in the price of real property, had produced an outrageous violation of contracts for time of every description. A farm, mortgaged twenty years before for a thousand pounds, had now to pay in reality the interest of little better than half the sum. It had produced a virtual violation of testaments, of marriage settlements, of grants of annuities, and, in short, of every contract for time, be the nature of it what it might.

119. The bullion committee, with a very dull man at its head, and with not a member belonging to it of any profundity, wishing to put an end to this progress of depreciation of the paper, thought they had found out the remedy in their proposi tion to compel the bank to return to a payment of its notes in gold. But this committee did not reflect that, if this measure were adopted, a violation of contracts on the other side would take place; they did not recollect the wills that had been made, the mortgages entered into, the mar riage settlements made, the annuities granted, the leases for various terms entered into; they did not recollect the number of these which must have taken place since the work of depreciation had begun; they did not collect that if the lenders had been robbed before, the borrower would be robbed now; and that, though it is at all times unjust to rob either lender or borrower, it is a thousand times more dangerous to a state, a thousand times more injurious to the commu

nity at large, to do wrong to the borrower than it is to do wrong to the lender; because the borrower is of necessity the poorer of the two; and, for the more important reason, that the industry and activity of the country are to proceed from the borrower and not from the lender.

120. But, above all things, the members of this committee forgot, or had not the powers of mind duly to estimate, the vast consequence, the great, the terrible consequence of compelling a nation to pay in gold of full tale and full weight and fineness, sums enormous which it had borrowed in depreciated paper. From the time when the paper began to depreciate, to the time when the bullion committee proposed that the bank should be compelled to pay its notes in gold, more than FIVE HUNDRED MILLIONS of pounds sterling of the debt had been contracted; that is to say, the parliament had borrowed more than five hundred millions in depreciated paper, which the bullion committee now proposed that the nation should be compelled to pay in gold of full weight and fineness. And, we are here to observe, that the difference between fourteen and twenty, as stated by the bullion committee, was not the real difference between the value of the paper and that of the gold. Gold having been driven out of the circulation of the country, there was, in fact, no measure of value for it as compared with the paper; there was no standard of value left in the country;

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there was no market price of gold; because there was no deposit to which the people could go to demand gold in exchange for the paper. Guineas were sold, it is true; but the seller sold with all the disadvantages attending an application of the commodity with regard to which application he understood nothing. The guinea, when purchased, was exported; and, of course, the profit and risk of the exporter must be considered as added to the price of the commodity; so that, there being no standard in either gold or silver whereby to ascertain the amount of the depreci ation of the paper, another standard must be sought, and the best and truest that presents itself is the bushel of wheat, with regard to which the fact is, that, on an average of years, the bushel of wheat, after the depreciation of the paper began, down to the time of the report of the bul lion committee, had been more than double the price at which that commodity had sold on an average of years, during an equal number of years preceding the commencement of the depreciation. 121. Therefore, to compel the nation to pay in gold the interest of sums borrowed in paper, must have been ruinous to all the active classes of society; to all, indeed, but the lenders of money. So far as the rejection of this proposition went, the ministers acted wisely; and, let it be observed, in passing, that this was a Whig proposition; that HORNER was a creature of the GRENVILLES;

that he was an Edinburgh Reviewer; that his project was supported by the whole body of the Whigs; and that, thus, it was they who laid the foundation of all the confusion and all the terrible ruin, in the pecuniary affairs of the nation, which have taken place between that day and this; these words being put upon the paper in June, 1831. The discussions of which I have been speaking took place in the session of 1811, and the RESOLUTION above cited, was passed on the 3rd of May in that year, three months after the Prince Regent chose PERCEVAL and his colleagues, and rejected the Whigs. But, in spite of this consoling resolution, the depreciation of the paper being found to go rapidly on, people began to make two prices, one price for gold and another price for paper. Landlords, in divers instances, seeing that the progress of the depreciation would soon rob them of the whole of their rents, began to make specific contracts to prevent their estates arriving at this point. In order to secure himself against a total loss of his rents, Lord KING, a baron of the House of Peers, demanded of his tenants payment of his rents in gold; but, at the same time, made the demand in so equitable a manner, as to leave those tenants no just cause of complaint. I have observed before, that there was in reality no standard of value; but Lord KING, taking the market price of gold as his standard, first ascertained by looking

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