The destruction of property which has taken place in the British Empire during the thirty years that this cheapening process was going on, exceeds probably anything recorded during a similar period in the annals of mankind. It has much exceeded all that was produced by the confiscations of the Convention, or the devastation of the wars of Napoleon. Each of the three great monetary crises of 1825, 1839, and 1847, occasioned the destruction at once of two or three hundred millions worth of mercantile property, and halved the fortunes of persons to double that extent. The intervals between them were, with the exception of a few brief gleams of perilous prosperity, periods of anxiety, gloom, and depression, during which all persons engaged in business, with the exception of the great capitalists, who were daily getting richer, found their property melting away under the ceaseless and progressive fall of prices. It was exactly the obverse of the vast impulse given to industry over the whole world by the discovery of the mines of Mexico and Peru, and the consequent rise of prices which everywhere ensued. One class, and one only, flourished amidst the general distress; but, unfortunately, in that class the government of the nation for the time was vested, viz., the _moneyed interest_. So immensely had this interest grown under the protective policy of the preceding hundred and fifty years, that it was able to set all other interests in the State at defiance, and to pursue the system of making the sovereign worth two sovereigns, despite the evident ruin which that system was bringing on all the industrious classes in the state. Future ages will ask what were the devastating wars, the stunning calamities, the loss of provinces, the severance of colonies, which inflicted such deep and irremediable wounds on the British nation during these memorable periods? and they will be answered, it was thirty years of unbroken peace at home, a series of brilliant colonial conquests abroad, and ONE SYSTEM.