himself as never to give his confidence lightly to any one; and, from a course of action to which duty or a conviction of its fitness pointed, neither blandishments nor their opposites could, under any circumstances, turn him aside." lature dethroning the king, or interfering in any way with the right of succession. Austria, Prussia, and Russia accepted the conditions readily, adhering, at the same time, to the substance of the notes which they had previously put in. The duke produced a paper of his own, in which the three hypothetical causes of war were considered separately. He showed, "First, that an attack by Spain upon France was an occurrence beyond the range of human probability; next, that though, according to the usages of civilised nations, the persons of monarchs were held to be sacred, to extend a character of sanctity to those of other members of the royal family was a thing never before heard of in the history of the world; and lastly, that, till the allies should be informed on sufficient authority that a plan for dethroning Ferdinand or changing the succession in Spain was actually in progress, to assume that such crimes might be perpetrated was to insult the whole Spanish nation. For his own part, he must decline to have any share in the transaction, or to deliver an opinion upon purely hypothetical cases further than this—that if the independence of Spain were assailed without just cause, Great Britain would be no party to the proceeding."* So prejudiced were the allied sovereigns against England, that they were ready to believe any tale to her disadvantage. One story which was circulated amongst them at the time was that England had bound herself to support Spain against France, in return for certain stipulated commercial advantages. Another was that she had entered into a secret treaty to defend Portugal against France, even though Portugal should join Spain in the war. After all the duke's arguments, explanations, and remonstrances, the French plenipotentiary was about to set off for Paris, repre In the midst of all this gaiety and pleasure, the despots did not lose sight of their great object to crush the liberties of Spain. Indeed, as appears from the foregoing passage, they availed themselves of the Circean cup of pleasure to accomplish their nefarious purposes. The "advances" of beautiful and gifted women were so many assaults on the integrity of the British plenipotentiary. Each Delilah in succession endeavoured to cut off the "invincible locks" of the hero of Waterloo, who, it is to be feared, gave them too many opportunities. But he did not betray his trust, and, on the whole, he acquitted himself as well as could be expected under the circumstances. Austria was induced to acknowledge an old debt to England, and to pay an instalment. The utmost which she could obtain from the allies on the slave trade was a reissue of the joint condemnation of the traffic which had been pronounced in 1815 at Vienna, and a special assurance from France that as soon as public feeling would admit, steps would be taken to carry out the treaty with England. In the discussion of the affairs of Italy the duke took no part; but the peace which he had urged upon Russia and Turkey was happily concluded, on terms honourable to both. With regard to the struggles for freedom in Spain and other countries, the duke found the allied sovereigns in the worst possible temper. They had no patience with England on account of her dissent, however mildly expressed, from their policy. "Hence, though England never expressed her approval of the military revolts in Spain and Italy, or even in South America, still, because she declined to be a party to the sup-senting all the powers as being perfectly unanimous on the pression of the free institutions in which they issued, Austria, Prussia, and Russia spoke of her as the champion of revolutionary principles all over the world." † Accordingly, the duke found himself alone in his opposi-declined even to consider his paper on the revolted South tion to the plan of an armed intervention in Spain. It was at first proposed that all the allies should unite in this; but it was ultimately agreed that a procès verbal should be jointly adopted, in which the king of Spain and his family should be declared to be under the protection of Europe, and Spain threatened with a terrible vengeance if any injury were done to them. This procès verbal was addressed to the head of the Spanish government, with an explanation of the reasons for its adoption. The duke was disappointed and mortified at the obstinate self-will of the crowned despots. He had gone to Verona in the hope that they would at all events be open to arguments in favour of peace; he found them bent on such a course as would render its preservation impossible. When the ministers reduced their ideas to a definite shape, the incidents which they agreed to accept as leading necessarily to war appeared to him fallacious in the extreme. They were these:-First, an armed attack by Spain upon France. Second, any personal outrage offered to Ferdinand VII., or to any member of the Spanish royal family. Third, an act of the Spanish legis policy adopted towards Spain, and the duke was obliged to threaten him with a public contradiction if he did not alter that statement and except England. The allies American provinces, venting their ill-feeling in the following remark :-"That it was a subject of deep regret to them that England should stand forth as the protector of jacobins in all parts of the world, and that they (the allis) had neither the power nor the inclination to prevent it." We are not surprised to learn that the duke withdrew from them greatly dissatisfied with the turn affairs had taken, and distrustful of the issue. In a parting interview with the emperor of Russia, the latter spoke at length in strong disapprobation of the refusal of England to co-operate in putting down revolution, and said, in conclusion, that Russia was prepared for every eventuality. "She was able, with the support of Austria and Prussia, to crush revolution both in France and Spain; and, if the necessity should arise, she was determined to do so." duke heard his imperial majesty to an end, and then ventured to assure him that there was no sympathy, and could be none, between England and revolutionists and jacobins anywhere. The system of English government was *Gleig, p. 381 The A.D. 1823.] INVASION OF SPAIN BY THE FRENCH. founded on respect for property; jacobinisin, or revolution in the sense which his imperial majesty applied to the term-on the confiscation of property. All for which England pleaded was the right of nations to set up whatever form of government they thought best, and to manage their own affairs, so long as they allowed other nations to manage theirs. Neither he nor the government which he represented were blind to the many defects which disfigured the Spanish constitution; but they were satisfied that the best remedy for these would be provided by time, and to that greatest of all practical reformers he advised that Spain and her constitution should be left. The emperor could not gainsay the justice of these remarks, neither was he willing to be persuaded by them; so, after expressing himself well pleased with the settlement which had been effected of the Turkish question, he embraced the duke, and they parted. The duke arrived at Paris on the 9th of December, having spent more than two months at diplomacy with very unsatisfactory results. He found the king and his minister, de Villele, much cooled in their feelings towards the Spanish government, in consequence of the tone of moderation it had assumed after its defeat of the royalist insurgents. The king was now disposed to recall his army of observation, if he could do so with honour, and all he pressed for now was that Spain should so modify her system as to make the constitution emanate from the king, by resting it upon a royal charter, and not upon the will of the people. If this were done, and done in time for him to explain the case to the parliament, when they met on the 28th of January, everything else, every matter of arrangement and detail, would be left to the undisturbed management of the Spanish cabinet and cortes. This was truly very accommodating. If Spain would only recant her constitutionalism, and adopt the absolutist creed of divine right, the allies would not send their armies into the country for the protection of the king against his people. The duke having reported the altered state of feeling in the French government, and all that had passed, to Mr. Canning, the foreign secretary instructed him to deliver an official note to M. de Villele, containing a direct offer from England to mediate. This offer was declined. On the 20th of December the duke quitted Paris, and arrived in London early in January. Subsequently the diplomatic war was carried on between M. Chateaubriand and Mr. Canning, both men of genius, and masters of a brilliant style of rhetoric, to which the duke of Wellington had no pretensions. Mr. Canning, alluding to the proposed armed intervention in Spain, with a view to stamp out the revolution, said, "The spirit of revolution-which, shut up within the Pyrenees, might exhaust itself with struggles, trying indeed to Spain, but harmless to her neighbours, when restricted-if called forth from within these precincts by the provocation of foreign attack, might find, perhaps, in other countries fresh aliment for its fury, and might renew throughout Europe the misery of the five-and-twenty years which preceded the peace of 1815." On the 29th of January the king of France opened the chambers with a warlike speech. It spoke of 77 100,000 French soldiers prepared to march under a prince of the blood for the deliverance of Ferdinand VII. and his loyal people from the tyranny of a portion. A few weeks after the march commenced, and from the Bidassoa to Madrid it was a continued triumph. The king was set at liberty, and the gates of Cadiz were opened. The Spaniards were not true to themselves, the mass of the people being unable to appreciate liberal institutions. There was also a counter-revolution in Portugal, aided by foreign bayonets, restoring the despotic system. These events produced great dissatisfaction in England, and the duke was strongly censured for the timidity of his tone in the congress. Replying to attacks made in the upper house by lords Ellenborough, Holland, and Grey, he asked whether it would be becoming in one who appeared in the character of a mediator to employ threats, especially if he had no power to carry them into effect:-" Were they for a policy of peace or a policy of war? If for the former, could he go further than to declare that to any violent attack on the independence of Spain the king his master would be no party? If for the latter, all he had to say was that he entirely differed from them, and he believed that his views would be supported by all the intelligent portion of the community." The conduct of the government in reference to the congress was the subject of an animated debate in the house of commons, which began on April 28th, and lasted three days. It was on a motion for a vote of censure for the feebleness of tone assumed by the government in the negotiations with the allies, an amendment having been proposed expressive of gratitude and approbation. In Mr. Canning's speech on the third day there was one remarkable passage, which clearly defined his foreign policy, and showed that it had a distinct purpose, and aimed at an object of the highest importance. He said :-"I contend, sir, that whatever might grow out of a separate conflict between Spain and France (though matter for grave consideration), was less to be dreaded than that all the great powers of the Continent should have been arrayed together against Spain; and that although the first object, in point of importance, indeed, was to keep the peace altogether, to prevent any war against Spain, the first in point of time was to prevent a general war; to change the question from one affecting the allies on the one side and Spain on the other, to a question between nation and nation. This, whatever the result might be, would reduce the quarrel to the size of ordinary events, and bring it within the scope of ordinary diplomacy. The immediate object of England, therefore, was to hinder the impress of a joint character from being affixed to the war, if war there must be, with Spain; to take care that the war should not grow out of an assumed jurisdiction of the congress; to keep within reasonable bounds that predominating areopagitical spirit which the memorandum of the British cabinet of May, 1820, describes as beyond the sphere of the original conception and understood principles of the alliance-an alliance never intended as a union for the government of the world, or for the superintendence of the internal affairs of other states; and this, I say, was accomplished." The sense of the house was so completely with the A.D. 1823.] CANNING ON THE RESOURCES OF ENGLAND. government, that Mr. Brougham, who led the opposition, declined to go to a division. A division having been called for, however, on the part of ministers, the whole assembly poured into the lobby, till it could hold no more; and then the remaining members who were shut in were compelled to pass for an opposition, though there were ministerialists among them. They amounted to twenty, in a house of 372.* The aggressive policy of the Holy Alliance, and the French invasion of Spain, despite England's remonstrances, provoked Mr. Canning to hasten the recognition of the revolted colonies in South America. It was in defending 79 cause we are unprepared for war; on the contrary, if eight months ago the government did not hesitate to proclaim that the country was prepared for war, if war should unfortunately be necessary, every month that has since passed has but made us so much the more capable of exertion. The resources created by peace are means of war: in cherishing those resources, we but accumulate those means. Our present repose is no more a proof of inability to act than a state of inertness and inactivity in which I have seen those mighty masses that float in the waters above your town, is a proof that they are devoid of strength, and incapable of being fitted for action. You well this policy that he uttered the memorable sentence so often quoted as a specimen of the sublime :-" Contemplating Spain such as our ancestors had known her, I resolved that if France had Spain, it should not be Spain with the Indies. I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the old." In a speech which he delivered at Plymouth occurs the famous passage in which he speaks of the pacific attitude of England :-" Our ultimate object was," he said, "the peace of the world; but let it not be said that we cultivate peace either because we fear, or be Miss Martineau's "Thirty Years' Peace," vol. i., p. 296. know, gentlemen, how soon one of those stupendous masses now reposing on their shadows in perfect stillnesshow soon, upon any call of patriotism or of necessity, it would assume the likeness of an animated thing instinct with life and motion; how soon it would ruffle, as it were, its swelling plumage; how quickly it would put forth all its beauty and its bravery, collect its scattered elements of strength, and awaken its dormant thunder. Such as is one of these magnificent machines when springing from inaction into a display of its might, such is England herself, while, apparently passive and motionless, she silently concentrates the power to be put forth on an adequate occasion." CHAPTER IX. NATIONAL PROSPERITY AND THE MONETARY SYSTEM. Agricultural Distress - Proposed Remedies-Mr. Cobbett-Resumption of Cash Payments-A restricted Currency-Scarcity of the Precious Metals-Inconvertible Paper Money-The Small Note Act; its Effect on Prices-Brilliant Dawn of Commercial Prosperity-Mr. Huskisson's Statement-A Popular Budget-The Reduction of the National DebtThe Sinking Fund-Mysteries of the Public Funds-Reform of our Commercial Policy-Mr. Huskisson as a Free Trader-Policy of the Navigation Laws-The Reciprocity System-His Answer to the Arguments of the Protectionists-The Shipping Interest-The Retaliatory Principle-The Petition of the London Merchants-The Principles of Free Trade clearly stated and triumphantly vindicated-Growing Influence of the Commercial Classes on Legislation in GeneralFlourishing State of all the National Interests-Enterprise and Progress-Joint Stock Companies-Abundance of Capital-Reckless Speculation-Excessive Issue of Notes by Country Banks-Spirit of Adventure -Mining Speculations-Drain of Bullion to South America-The Commercial Crisis-General Panic; its ruinous Effects-Remedy, a Government issue of Inconvertible Bank Notes-Evils of an inadequate Currency. THE year 1823 opened auspiciously, and continued to exhibit unequivocal marks of progressive prosperity. Every branch of manufacturing industry was in a flourishing state. The cotton trade was unusually brisk. There was a considerable increase in the quantity of silks and woollens manufactured; and in consequence of augmenting exportation, the demand for hardware and cutlery was quickened from the state of stagnation in which it had remained since the conclusion of the war. The shipping interest, which had been greatly depressed, fully shared in the general improvement. The agriculturists, however, were still embarrassed and discontented. In January no less than sixteen English counties had sent requisitions to their sheriffs to call meetings to consider the causes of their distresses. The principal remedies proposed were reduction of taxation; a reform of the house of commons; a depreciation of the currency; a commutation of tithes; and an appropriation of the redundant wealth of the church to the public exigencies. At the Norwich meeting a series of resolutions were proposed and seconded by the gentry of the county, but they were rejected and put aside on the motion of Mr. Cobbett, who read a petition which was adopted with acclamation. It recommended an appropriation of part of the church property to the payment of the public debt; a reduction of the standing army; an abolition of sinecures and undeserved pensions; the sale of the crown lands; an equitable adjustment of contracts; the suspension of all legal processes for one year for the recovery of rents and tithes; and the repeal of the taxes on malt, soap, leather, hops, and candles. The distress which had pressed so severely on the country, and which set the people thinking about the most perilous political changes, was intimately connected with the state of the currency. Throughout the troubled period of almost incessant war and lavish expenditure between 1797 and 1815, the business of the nation was carried on with an inconvertible paper currency, the precious metals having nearly all departed from the country. Bank notes were issued in such quantities, to meet the exigencies of the government, that the prices of all commodities were nearly doubled. The bill which was passed in 1819 providing for the resumption of cash payments, had reduced the currency from £48,278,070, which was its amount in 1819, to £26,588,000, in 1822. The consequence was the reduction of prices in the meantime, at the rate of fifty per cent., in all the articles of production and commerce. With this tremendous fall of prices, the amount of liabilities remained unchanged; rents, taxes, and encumbrances were to be paid according to the letter of the contract, while the produce and commodities-the sale of which was relied upon to pay them-did not produce more than half the amount that they would have brought at the time of the contracts. The evil of this sudden change was aggravated by the South American revolution, in cousequence of which the annual supply of the precious metals was reduced to a third of its former amount. It was peculiarly unfortunate that this stoppage in the supply of gold and silver occurred at the very time that our legislature had adopted the principle that paper currency should be regarded as strictly representing gold, and should be at any moment convertible into sovereigns. A paper currency should never be allowed to exceed the available property which it represents, but it is not necessary that its equivalent in gold should be lying idle in the coffers of the bank, ready to be paid out at any moment the public should be seized with a foolish panic. It is enough that the credit of the state should be pledged for the value of the notes, and that credit should not be strained beyond the resources at its command. The close of 1822 formed the turning-point in the industrial condition of the country. The extreme cheapness of provisions, after three years of comparative privation, enabled those engaged in manufacturing pursuits to purchase many commodities which they had hitherto not been able to afford. This caused a gradual revival of trade, which was greatly stimulated by the opening of new markets for our goods, especially in South America, to which our exports were nearly trebled in value between 1818 and 1823, when the independence of the South American republics had been established. The confidence of the commercial world was reassured by the conviction that South America would prove an unfailing Dorado for the supply of the precious metals. The bankers, therefore, became more accommodating; the spirit of enterprise again took possession of the national mind, and there was a general expansion of industry by means of a freer use of capital, which gave employment and contentment to the people. This effect was materially promoted by the Small Note Bill which was passed in July, 1822, extending for ten years longer the period during which small notes were to be issued; its termination having been fixed by Peel's bill for 1823. The average of bank notes in circulation in 1822 was £17,862,890. In November of the following year it had increased by nearly two millions. The effect of this extension of the small note circulation upon prices was remarkable. Wheat rose from 38s. to 528., and in 1824 it mounted up to 643. In the meantime the bullion in the bank of England increased so much, that whereas in 1819 it had been only £3,595,360, in January, 1824, it amounted to £14,200,000. effect of all these causes combined was the commencement of a reign of national prosperity, which burst upon the country like a brilliant morning sun, chasing away the The |