for us to maintain that character as a nation which we think indispensable in an individual, if, in a time of profound peace, instead of reducing our public debt, we go on adding to it from year to year.” Here it is admitted, by the Whig Chancellor of the Exchequer, that after twenty years of profound peace and unbroken Liberal government, (Sir Robert Peel was essentially Liberal,) not only has there been no reduction of the public debt, but AN INCREASE OF IT TO THE EXTENT OF TWENTY-SEVEN MILLIONS. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that, if the noble sinking-fund of L.15,000,000 a-year, which Mr Pitt’s policy left to the Administration at the close of the war in 1815, had been preserved unimpaired by keeping up the indirect taxes from which it arose, the whole national debt would have been extinguished in 1845. When the ruinous monetary act of 1819, and the increasing concession of successive Administrations to urban clamour had rendered that impossible, the semi-Liberal semi-Tory Governments from 1815 to 1830 still contrived to pay off L.82,000,000 of the public debt in fifteen years; and when the Duke of Wellington resigned in November 1830, he left, by the admission of all parties, a real sinking-fund, arising from an excess of income above expenditure, of L.2,900,000 a-year to his successors. But since that time, under his Liberal successors, not only has that surplus on an average of years disappeared, but during twenty years of profound peace L.27,000,000 has been _added_ to the total amount of the debt. Well may Sir Charles Wood say, “What should we think of a private individual who acted in such a manner?” Such is the rule of the urban constituencies, to humour whose fancies, and appease whose clamour, the whole efforts of Government for the last twenty years have been directed.