This is tolerably strong evidence from the leading and ablest free trade and bullionist journal. Strong indeed must have been the testimony of facts around them, when the well-informed and powerful writers in the _Times_ put forth such admissions as to the state of the country. Observe, the emphatic words wrung by woful experience from this journal. "Three years back an indignant negative would have been given to such conjectures; but SINCE THEN the progress of demoralisation has been rapid." Sir R. Peel's Bank Act was passed in 1844, and his free trade measures in 1846. And be it observed that that state arose _entirely under their own system_; at a time when the Bank charter stood unchanged, and free trade, the grand panacea for all evils, was, and had been in a great degree, for years, in full and unrestrained operation. We shall see anon whether the Irish famine and English railways had any thing material to do with the matter. Strong as it is, however, this testimony is increased by the real evidence of facts in every direction, and of the acts and admissions of government. These are of such a kind as a few years ago would have passed for fabulous. They have outstripped the most gloomy predictions of the most gloomy of the Protectionists; they have out-Heroded Herod in the demonstration of the perilous tendency of the path we have so long been pursuing. They could not have been credited, if not supported by the evidence of our own senses, and the statements of ministers of high character, from undoubted and authentic sources of information. We subjoin a few of them, of universal and painful notoriety to every inhabitant of the empire at this time; not in the belief that we, in so doing, can add any facts not previously familiar to the nation, but in order that these facts, now so well known, should get into a more durable record than the daily journals, and not pass for fabulous in future, and it is to be hoped, happier times.