Again, the income-tax returns for 1846, of this miserably poor nation, exhibit a revenue of £5,200,000 yearly drawn from this source, though the tax is only 7d. in the pound, or £2, 18s. 4d. _per cent._, and though the tax did not legally go below incomes of £150, and in practice generally excluded those under £200 a-year. The income-tax, in the last year of the war, produced £15,000,000 at 10 _per cent._, reaching all incomes above £60 a-year. Had the same standard been adopted in 1842, when it was reimposed by Sir R. Peel, it would have produced at least £18,000,000 yearly, which sum, increased by 33 _per cent._ from the enhanced value of money by the operation of the act of 1819, would correspond to about £24,000,000, according to the value of money in 1815. This proves that the wealth of the nation had _more than kept pace_ with the increase of its population; for the numbers of the people in the two islands in 1815 were 18,000,000, and in 1845 about 28,000,000, or somewhat above 50 _per cent._ increase. Lastly, this miserably poor nation, which has eaten up its resources in the shape of quarters of grain and fat bullocks in a single year, exported and imported in the three years 1812, 1814, and 1815, and 1843, 1844, and 1845, before free-trade began, respectively as follows: Exports. Imports. Official value. Official value. 1812, £29,508,517 £24,923,922 1813--Records destroyed by fire. 1814, 34,207,253 32,622,711 1815, 42,875,996 31,822,053 1843, £117,877,278 £70,093,353 1844, 131,564,503 75,441,555 1845, 132,444,503 85,281,958 Such were the commercial transactions of this nation, which, in the interval from 1815 to 1845, had become so miserably poor. Keeping these facts in view, we again ask: Having down to 1845 been so rich, _what has since made us so poor_? The free-traders and bullionists tell us it was neither the abolition of the corn-laws nor the Bank Charter Act. Then what is it which in so short a time has produced so great, so terrible a revulsion? Government, and their organs in the press, assert that it was the Irish famine, and the absorption of capital in railways. To avoid any chance of misconception on so vital a point, we subjoin the words of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the debate on the currency on 30th November 1847, as reported in the _Morning Post_ of December 1, which were in substance the same as those employed by the Marquis of Lansdowne in the House of Lords:-- "Up to October there had been no great pressure; but in that month the pressure rapidly rose by reason of the _abstraction of capital for railways and corn_. The House would be surprised to hear the amount of capital thus abstracted for corn in fifteen months.