Had the system of cheapening, carried into effect by the contraction of the currency on the one hand, and the extensive remission of duties on the other, been attended by beneficial consequences to the people, and resulted in general happiness and prosperity, there would at least have been some set-off against the ruin of our financial prospects which it has occasioned; and we might have consoled ourselves for the evident imposition of the public debt as a hopeless burden upon the nation, by the reflection that at least temporary wellbeing had resulted from the change. Has this been the case? Alas! the fact is just the reverse; and among the many mournful reflections which the present hopeless condition of our finances awakens, it is perhaps the most mournful, that the price paid for it has been, not public happiness, but general and unprecedented misery. In the long and varied annals of English history, there is beyond all question no period which has been marked by such repeated and widespread suffering as the thirty years which have elapsed since the cheapening system was begun, by the contraction of the currency in 1819, and the present time, when it has been carried into full effect by Sir R. Peel’s Free-trade policy in 1846. The three dreadful monetary crises of 1825, 1839, and 1847, followed, as each of them was, by several years of devastation and ruin to the trading classes; the repeated recurrence of agricultural distress, especially from 1832 to 1836, and in 1849; the unheard-of agonies of the Irish famine of 1846, perpetuated by the fall of prices, which rendered agriculture unremunerative over great part of that country,—are some of the leading features of an epoch which will ever be regarded as at once the most momentous and the most disastrous which the British Empire has ever known.