It is the fear of this power which, to a great extent, is at the present moment paralysing the enterprise of the commercial communities, which would otherwise have succeeded in neutralising a portion at least, but certainly only a portion, of the ruinous effects of Free-trade. A few years ago, no community embarked more largely in those railway investments, so strongly recommended to them by the fosterer of the system, Sir Robert Peel, than the mercantile people of Liverpool. The extent to which such investments were encouraged by the lavish offer of banking facilities to merchants and others, may be judged of by the fact, that the Directors of one Liverpool Bank were, a few weeks ago, compelled to acknowledge to their shareholders, that nearly the whole of their subscribed capital was advanced upon railway stock; and that their Rest, amounting to £100,000, had entirely disappeared. This species of security is now, by the caution with which capitalists act, rendered totally unavailable for the purpose of raising money, when required for legitimate commercial purposes. Hence the timid apprehension with which men, thus situated, regard the accumulation of stocks of produce, for which no remunerative market at present offers itself; and the consumption of which is so obviously on the decline. Hence also the pressure to sell, when they see cargo after cargo pouring in to augment those stocks; the unwillingness to part with funds, for which the shopkeeper and the tradesman are eagerly longing, to enable them to sustain their tottering credit; and that total suspension of all internal enterprise and improvement, which is driving so many thousands of our skilled workmen to other countries, and the labourer to that desolate resort for the very poor—the Union Workhouse. To the attempt to carry out a Free-trade, involving the holding of large stocks of produce and extended operations in foreign markets, with a currency artificially restricted by the last Banking Act of Sir Robert Peel, and further restricted by the caution with which bankers are now conducting their business, since the severe warning inflicted upon them in 1847, is attributable not only the commercial depression already noticed, but also that fearful sacrifice of realised capital, which has taken place from the decline in the saleable value of railway shares, and which, in Liverpool alone, has rendered hundreds of once wealthy men comparatively poor ones, and brought many, in the decline of their days, to a condition lower than that even in which they began the world.