task of producing and exporting an equivalent in the shape of manufactured goods or British products, our entire monetary system collapses, and brings down devastation and ruin upon our heads. The producer of British commodities, heavily weighted as he is with responsibilities--holding large stocks, or having his capital invested in fixed property--can no more resist the tyranny of this system than he can turn back the tide or arrest an avalanche. He must go on producing and exporting--or his class, at all events, must--whatever be the price of the raw material upon which he works, or the certainty that its sale must result in heavy loss. He must go on, because a monetary crisis is infinitely more disastrous in its results than the most disastrous losses arising from glut in the foreign or the British markets. There is gross indecency, and, indeed, impudence, displayed by those parties who proclaim that a policy, which has produced such results as I have detailed, is not even to be examined with a view to its possible modification. All other monuments of the wisdom of mere man are found to require occasionally the improving hand; but the policy dictated by the Manchester school of economists is pronounced to be irrevocable, and not to be reviewed by the light of experience. Although it has inflicted ruin upon the great mass of our agricultural community; although it has been pregnant with commercial and industrial disaster; although it has falsified in its operations all the predictions of its authors; yet it has produced "a cheap loaf" and "cheap imports;" and upon these it is deemed sacrilegious for the statesman to impose his amending hand. But the common sense of the community, I venture to predict, will not submit to an imposture and injustice so gross. For the intelligent mercantile classes, I can answer that they will not. These men know, from the lessons taught by their every-day transactions, that the existing miscalled system of Free Trade cannot be much longer persevered in without producing widespread ruin, and ultimate disaffection and anarchy. To enable us to increase our imports profitably, we must first have a corresponding increase of the ability of our own people to consume. To enable us to carry on a profitable trade in exports, we must first render the home producer of manufactures and other products less dependent than at present upon the foreign market; and this can only be done by enabling the masses of our own population, whether employed in agriculture or in other industrial pursuits, to consume more largely. To enable us to hold the position of being the merchants and brokers of the world, and the holders of its accumulated stores of wealth, we must first have provided for us a more expansive monetary system. The Free-Trader cannot, or will not, see the existence of these wants, obvious as they are, and necessary to be supplied, if his favourite policy is to be rendered a practicable one. The experience of the past