The alleged advantage which the Free-trade party oppose to the obviously calamitous effects of this incessant surrender of the public revenue, and the now admitted abandonment of all attempts to pay off the public debt, is, that commodities have been cheapened thereby, and the weight which oppressed them taken off the springs of industry. We utterly deny this advantage. What is the good of this constant cheapening, when confessedly you cannot cheapen our debts and obligations? Is it anything else but diminishing the funds from which the interest of these debts and obligations is to be discharged, and running the nation into the most imminent hazard of incurring a general bankruptcy, public and private? Do not salaries and incomes fall, from the highest to the lowest, in consequence; and if so, what good does the fall of prices do, even to the individuals who apparently profit by it? Suppose we gained our object, and rendered everything as cheap here as it is in Poland or Norway—what should we gain by it, but that we should speedily become _as poor as them_, and that the realised wealth of this nation, now for the most part invested in situations where its interest is paid by the industry of the people, would be lost by that industry having ceased to receive a sufficient remuneration? And is that an object for which the national security should be endangered, and the means of maintaining our independence destroyed? In truth,—with the exception of some manufactured articles, such as cotton and calicoes, in which the fall of prices has been prodigious, owing to the successive improvement of the machinery employed in their formation,—we are at a loss to see that this immense remission of indirect taxes, which has evidently been fatal to the national finances, has been attended with the slightest benefit to the country generally. We say the country generally—because there can be no doubt that it has been a very great advantage to the _master-manufacturers engaged in the trades affected by the taxes_, who have, in most cases, contrived to put the whole tax lost to the public into their own pockets. That is the real secret of the remission. Individual selfishness, the thirst for gain, was in most cases the moving spring. The parties interested besieged the Chancellor of the Exchequer with memorials, setting forth the hardships they sustained from the tax affecting their branch of industry, and the immense benefit the _public_ would derive from its abolition; but the public was the very last thing they were really thinking of. It was their own profits to which they were looking; and but for that, they never would have stirred in the matter. The immense fortunes made in many branches of manufactures, during the last quarter of a century, have been in great part owing to the tax remitted having been wholly gained to the master-manufacturers engaged in them. We pay the same now for our shoes and beer as we did thirty years ago, though,