since its termination, the whole tax on leather and the war tax on malt have been repealed. There is no doubt that prices have declined in most articles of consumption to a great degree during the last twenty-five years, and in some to a most extraordinary extent. But where the decline has been great—as, for example, in cottons or calicoes, which are now selling for a fifth of what they cost during the war—it is not owing to the remission of taxation, so much as to the extraordinary perfection to which machinery and the division of labour have been brought. The proof of this is decisive. The fall of price has been fully as great in branches of manufactures in regard to which no remission has taken place, or in a very slight degree, as in those in which it has been most considerable. And in regard to all commodities, the effect of the monetary bills of 1819, 1826, and 1844, must be taken into consideration. Those bills, by contracting the currency to _one half_ of what it previously had been in proportion to the industry and population of the country, have effected a revolution of prices so great, that nearly the whole reduction of the cost of articles prior to the last year is to be ascribed to it. The great organ of the money interest, the _Times_, boasts that recent legislation has doubled the value of the sovereign. Unquestionably it has; and of course it has also doubled the whole debt of the country, public and private. It has turned the national debt of £800,000,000 into £1,600,000,000; it has made the annual taxation of £52,000,000 as burdensome as £100,000,000 would have been during the war. Prices have generally fallen; but it is the contraction of the currency which has done that. As to the remission of taxation, with the exception of a few articles, such as salt and spirits, in which the remission, being very large, was immediately felt by the consumer, the reduction of prices has not been greater than necessarily flowed from the artificial scarcity of money, and would have been the same though no reduction of public duties had taken place. Generally speaking, the tax, lost to the public, has been entirely gained by the master-manufacturer.