the great change in the relative position of the different classes of society, and general suffering among the labouring ones, which terminated in the Reform Bill. The precise reverse of this may be anticipated from the recurrence of causes so much the reverse of those which had produced it. If the working classes are generally well employed, and industry is adequately remunerated, it may with confidence be anticipated that cheerfulness, the very reverse of the sullen discontent which ensued from the opposite state of things, will ensue.

One obvious and immediate effect which will result from such a change in the position of the industrial classes of society is, that the influence of towns will insensibly decline, and that of the country be restored. The constant increase in the value of money gave a vast increase of influence to the monied classes who dwelt in towns, and a proportional diminution in that of the agricultural interest who live in the country, and are supported by its labour. Not only were the landlords and their tenantry weakened by the diminished price which they received for their produce, but they were rendered powerless in a still greater degree by the exactions of their creditors, the amount of whose debts suffered no abatement, save from the reduction of interest by the changes which were making so vast a revolution in the relative position of the different classes of society. In proportion as these parties were rendered unequal to bearing the weight of their debts, were the creditors increased in wealth and importance; and the whole monied and industrious classes who dwelt in towns, and depended on the value of money, enriched and rendered more powerful.

As the reverse of all this must ensue from the opening of the great banks of issue in California and Australia, so the opposite set of effects may with confidence be anticipated from their effects. The long preponderance of money over labour will be first lessened, and at last taken away. The Reform Bill was brought about by the policy which, by rendering the sovereign worth two sovereigns, ere long made the representation of the holders of sovereigns in the legislature nearly double in number

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that of the raisers of corn. if the sovereign comes to be worth only a sovereign, and at last worth only half a sovereign, what will come of the holders of debts measured by that standard? Will they be able to maintain the place won by the doubling of the value of money after it has been halved? Unquestionably they will not.

In social not less than military contests, the last sovereign carries the day. The monied classes will not be ruined by the change, as the industrial well-nigh were by the measures procured during their ascendancy; but their wings will be clipped, their preponderance diminished, and their ability to preserve their own interests in the measures of the Legislature, without any regard to their effect upon the industrial classes of society, proportionally taken away.

The landed interest also will, to a certain degree, recover their wealth and importance under the operation of the change of prices. As the price of grain, and of all the produce of the soil, will be materially raised, probably, before five years have elapsed, doubled by the gold discoveries, their revenues must be proportionally augmented, and the weight of their debts in a similar degree lessened. This is a most important effect, which will not only relieve them of great part of their difficulties, but, by enabling them to increase their expenditure, restore a considerable part of that influence which they formerly possessed, and in a certain degree alter the present subverted balance of society. At the same time, it is not unmixed good which will result even to the landed interest from these changes in the respective position of the different classes of society. The evil which was done to them during the usurpation of power by the monied classes, from the operation of Peel's bill, cannot be taken away by the change in the value of money which has now set in on the other side. Protection has been taken away, emigration has set in, and will not for a long period, to all appearance, be arrested. The enhanced value of money will, of necessity, operate much more powerfully on the wages of labour in this than any of the adjoining states; and, in consequence, the cost, especially of producing grain crops, will be enhanced much more here than

in the adjoining states. The necessary consequence must be a daily increasing importation of foreign grain, which will at length arrive at such a point as will turn nearly the whole of our arable into grass lands, and render us dependent for the greater part of our food upon the industry of foreign lands. Still, even then, how disastrous soever the change may prove to the independence and security of the country, its beneficial effect upon the incomes of the landed proprietors will be very great; and possibly England, like Rome when taken by the Goths, may come to be in the hands of a few thousand great landed proprietors, deriving their revenue from the profits of pasture-lands, but many of them in possession of £150,000 a year of rental.

One very curious and unforeseen effect may be anticipated from the progression in the value of money, and rise in the money price of everything else; and that is, the effect it must come, ere long, to have on the class of persons entitled to the electoral suffrage under the existing law. This is the practical lowering of the franchise, which must result from the diminution of the value of money. If £10 comes to be only worth £5, the ten-pounder practically becomes a five-pounder, and the suffrage is, to all intents and purposes, lowered a half. Great, indeed, must be the effect of this alteration on the popular influence and balance of parties in the state. A similar change took place in former days, in consequence of the discovery of the mines of South America. The 40s. freeholder, who, when the franchise was fixed, in the time of Henry VI., was originally worth £40 a-year of our money, gradually fell, with the influx of silver, to be only worth, first, £20 a-year, then £10, then £5, and at last only £2. A similar change may be anticipated as likely to take place still more quickly from the influx of gold, which, as the more valuable metal, will affect prices much more rapidly than silver did; and possibly, before twenty years have elapsed, if the produce of the mines continues to be as considerable as it now is, the ten-pounder may in reality become what a two-pounder was at the date of the Reform Bill being passed. The effect of this will, of

course, be, that the House of Commons will be still further popularised than it now is; it will be returned by a constituency, the majority of which is composed of the WORKING CLASSES. By the simple act of Providence, in opening the mines of California and Australia, power in Great Britain will slip from the hands of the ten-pounders-that is, the BUYING AND SELLING CLASS-and fall into those of the fourpounders-that is, the WORKING AND PRODUCING CLASS. As the burgh members are three-fifths of the House of Commons, this class of men will, if the present constitution remains unaltered, and without any legislative lowering of the franchise, acquire the entire direction of the state.

As this change arises from causes beyond human prevention or control, and lasting in their operation, it becomes of the very highest importance to ascertain what alteration it is likely to produce on the course of legislation, and the commercial and financial policy and destinies of the state. In venturing to speculate on the probable results of this great change, the only safe principles we can go upon are, that men, when possessed of power, will use it for their own real or supposed interests, and that those interests must be such as are immediate, and lying, as it were, on the surface. Experience has shed a broad light on this subject. The ten-pounders in Great Britain got possession, by means of the Reform Bill, of supreme power, and they immediately made use of it to introduce the cheapening system, in order to augment the range of their markets, and increase the profits of buying and selling. Free Trade was a corollary from, and direct consequence of, the Reform Bill, which gave the shopkeepers the command of a majority in the House of Commons. The working classes, by means of universal suffrage, acquired the direction of affairs in France and America, and the first use they made of their power was to establish a rigid system of protection in both countries, in the former by ad valorem protective duties of 30 per cent on every species of produce; in the latter by discriminating duties still more effective. These opposite results were the natural, and, in truth, unavoidable, consequence of the same principle-self-interest moulding the

measures of the legislature according to the class invested with the government of the state. In the one, as this power was vested in the shopkeepers, everything was sacrificed to their real or supposed interests, which were universally conceived to be, to buy cheap and sell dear. In the other, as it was placed in the working classes, who, in every country, form a vast majority under a universal or low suffrage system, this object was disregarded, and the paramount consideration was to secure the interests of labour, by excluding the competition of rival states.

We have often said, in reference to the plans for lowering the suffrage, that there was such a thing as descending through the stratum of Free Trade into that of Protection. As the suffrage will be practically lowered, in a few years, to the extent of at least a half of its existing amount, by the simple operation of the change in the value of money, irrespective of any legislative enactments, it deserves serious consideration whether this effect will not take place in this country, and is not, in truth, inevitable. The operatives, especially in the manufacturing districts, are keenly alive to their own interests, and dread nothing so much as that beating-down and cheapening system, which is so much the object of favour with the shopkeeping class above them. At present they submit to it because they cannot help it, and have been enticed into this system by the cry of cheap bread, and the exhibition of the big and the little loaf. But let them get the command of the state by the virtual or legislative lowering of the franchise, so as to admit the millions to sway the elections, and we shall see what they will do. Rely upon it, they will establish a system of protection to exclude the competition of rival states, just as they have done in France and America. Does any one suppose that the cotton-spinners of England will look with a favourable eye on the importation, duty free, or at a small cost, of the cotton goods of France or Germany, or the silk-manufacturers of Spitalfields or Macclesfield on that of the silks of Lyons? The thing is ridiculous, and out of the question. And as prices will, as a matter of course, be much more raised in Great Britain than in the rival Con

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tinental states, this effect will be greatly accelerated by the enhancement of prices, owing to the increased gold coming in. There will be more difficulty, doubtless, in persuading the operatives of towns that their interests are identified with protection to agricultural produce, because it tends to augment the price of provisions. as the classes directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture are double those dependent on manufactures, any considerable lowering of the franchise, either directly by law, or indirectly by an enlarged currency, will gradually give them the majority, and the division of the country into electoral districts would at once do so.

The great danger to be apprehended from such a vesting of the government of the state in the working classes, is not to the monarchy, but to the holders of realised wealth. Experience has now opened the eyes of men generally to the important truth that universal suffrage, in old states, leads directly and inevitably to the establishment of despotic and monarchical power: the example of republican France seating Louis Napoleon on the throne by a majority of seven millions of votes, has not been lost upon mankind. The reason is, that when power is so infinitely subdivided, it becomes, like air or water, valueless in general estimation to its possessors; and the powerful agency of individual ambition being thus removed from the social and national feelings of mankind, the instinct of loyalty acts with undiminished force. We do not believe that the throne of Queen Victoria would be endangered by the establishment of universal suffrage in the British dominions; and but for the fatal supremacy of Paris, France, in 1793, would have supported the monarchy, and maintained Louis XVI. on the throne. But the case is very different with the holders of realised capital or great estates. They would run the most imminent hazard from any change which should admit the working classes into the direction of the state. What they would do may be guessed at with unerring certainty, by observing what, on a similar acquisition, the ten-pounders have done.

They have established Free Trade, relieved themselves of all direct taxes, and declared an absolute immunity

from direct taxation in their own favour, under the penalty of instant dismissal from office of any government proposing such a monstrous thing as the imposition of any burdens on them. They willingly lay it on the land in the shape of a duty on successions, or on professions in that of an impost or income, because they are below the taxable law; but anything like a house-tax, which would include themselves, is out of the question. The household-suffrage men will be not a whit behind the Magyars of Hungary, the notables of France, and the ten-pounders of England, in declaring an immunity from taxation in their own favour; but as they have, in general, no income to tax under any line which they will permit to be drawn, and no property to succeed to, the immunity for which they will contend will be from the taxes on consumption of such articles as they eat and do not produce. Tea, sugar, beer, tobacco, rum, spirits, and the like, if rendered duty free, would free them from fifteen or twenty millions, great part of which they do pay; and to the removal of these taxes, as the real burden on labour, it may be considered as certain the efforts of the working classes, under any approach to universal suffrage, will be mainly directed. The gap they will propose to fill up by increased duties on realised property, in the form of propertytax and succession-duties-that is, by indirect measures of confiscation. "Free Trade," say the Americans, "is another word for direct taxation; and direct taxation is another word for abolition of state debts." If the fundholders of Great Britain come to be threatened with direct or indirect confiscation, it will be the consequence of the system of government which, for selfish objects, they themselves introduced.

But whatever opinions may be formed on these speculative points, the unravelling of which as yet lies buried in the womb of fate, one thing is perfectly clear, and has already been proved,

that we have been saved from a monetary crisis of the most severe, perhaps unprecedented description, in these times, entirely in consequence of the monetary system of Sir R. Peel having been counterworked by the discovery of the Californian and Australian mines. With a balance of imports over exports of from £30,000,000 to £40,000,000 sterling a-year for five years past, how is it possible to conceive that a monetary crisis could have been averted, of the most dreadful character, if the plentiful supplies from the gold regions had not given us the means of supplying the deficiency? This explains how it happens that the gold does not remain in this country, and how the bullion in the Bank of England, though still immense, has sunk £4,000,000 within the last twelve months. It goes abroad to pay the balance of imports over exports occasioned by the Free-Trade system. But for these immense supplies, the making good that balance must, two years ago, have landed us in a crisis exceeding in severity anything recorded in English history-the crash of 1847 itself not excepted. Suppose at this moment the importations of gold were to cease, or to be seriously diminished, can any one doubt that a dreadful monetary crisis would not at once ensue? The huge balance of imports over exports would speedily drain us of our gold, and, of course, under Sir Robert Peel's system, drain us of our notes also. Even as it is, nothing is more certain than that any foreign events likely to increase this vast drain upon our metallic resources will occasion a considerable embarrassment in the money market, of which the recent raising of bank discounts to 34 per cent on the prospect of a war between Russia and Turkey is a proof. If then we are, and have for two years been prosperous, it is not in consequence of, but in spite of Free Trade; if we have avoided, and are avoiding disaster, it is not in consequence of our monetary system, but because Providence has reversed it.