It has left its traces deeply furrowed and for ever marked in English annals. It has produced consequences which will never be forgotten, and to which the historians of future times will point as the turning-point of British story, an eternal warning to future ages. It has produced the Revolution of 1832; disfranchised our whole Colonies; displaced the government of property, talent, and intelligence in the ruling island, and installed that of buying and selling in its stead. It has severed the public policy from the protection of the Land and Native Industry, the real inheritance and only sure patrimony of the nation, and anchored it instead on the shifting quicksands of Commercial Prosperity. It has destroyed the West Indies beyond the possibility of redemption, and spread discontent so widely through our other Colonies, that it is universally known they are all only waiting for some serious disaster to the parent state, or the advent of a protracted and hazardous war, to declare themselves independent. It has rendered every seventh man in Great Britain and Ireland, taken together, a pauper. It has driven from 250,000 to 300,000 industrious citizens, for the last three years, annually into exile from their native land. It has raised the poor-rate in both islands to an unprecedented height, and, when measured by its true standard, the price of subsistence to double what it ever was before. It has implanted the seeds of ruin in our Mercantile Navy, by the rapid growth of foreign shipping as compared with British in carrying on our own trade. It has rendered our shores defenceless as they were in the days of the Saxon Heptarchy; and made one of our first admirals, Sir Charles Napier, thankful when the winter frosts closed the Baltic harbours, and secured our capital from the insulting visits of the successors of the sea-kings of the north. It has rendered our means of raising a revenue so hopeless, that the “greatest bill-broker in the world,” Mr Gurney, has declared that we must end in national bankruptcy; and the leader of the Free-traders himself, Mr Cobden, has publicly said that there is no resource but to disband our troops, sell our ships of war, and trust the national security to the justice and moderation of our enemies, and the total absence of envy in our rivals. Such, and not public and passing felicity, is the price which the nation has paid for the ruin of its finances, the abandonment of the sinking-fund, and the imposing of the public debt _for ever_, as a burden, hopeless of redemption, on the country.