year to which the returns have been corrected.”
We have not observed any answer attempted by the Liberal papers to these
convincing facts; they content themselves with abusing the able
gentleman who brought them forward.
These considerations reveal the real causes both of the great exports
and imports of last year, and the vast losses with which both were
accompanied, and the decline in the main articles of our exports which
is now going on. It was the failure of the home market, owing to Free
Trade, which did the whole. Finding the customary channels of home
consumption falling off, our merchants were constrained, at all hazards,
to send their goods abroad, and thence the great exportation, amounting
in all to £73,000,000 of goods, accompanied by no profit, but by a loss
of £19,000,000, as we showed in a former article on the subject, to the
exporters.[8] Finding credit easy, and money easily got from the
influence of California, they engaged largely in importations, and
swelled our total imports, as Mr Newdegate has proved, to £112,000,000.
But the result soon showed them that it is impossible to import
profitably into an impoverished country; and as most of these imports
were sold at from 15 to 20 per cent below prime cost, implying a loss of
not less than £20,000,000 to the importers on our imports, it is easy to
say what species of a commerce Free Trade has brought upon the country.
It is not surprising in these circumstances that there should now be a
great decline in the last quarter, in the exports of our cotton goods,
of nearly £500,000, and that the revenue for the year ending July 5,
1852, was above half a million less than in the preceding year.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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