Sir R. Peel asserts that many of the houses which have lately become insolvent, have done so from excessive imprudence of speculation; and he succeeded in eliciting some cheers and laughter from the House of Commons, by contrasting in some extreme cases the amount of the debts brought out in bankruptcy with the assets. Without deeming it necessary to defend the conduct of all the houses, the affairs of which have been rendered public by the vast corn trade and railway speculations into which he plunged the nation, it seems sufficient to observe, that _all_ fortunes made by credit must, if suddenly arrested in the course of formation by such a contraction of the currency as we have lately experienced, exhibit the same, or nearly the same, results. Fortunes, with the magnitude of which the Right Hon. Baronet and Mr Jones Loyd are well acquainted, might possibly, if they had been thrown on their beam-ends suddenly, by such a tornado, have exhibited, when in growth, not a much more flattering feature. But the "Pilot who weathered the storm" was then at the helm, and he weathered it for their fortunes not less than for those of the country. He _aided_ commercial distress in adversity by increasing, instead of _aggravating_ it by contracting, the currency. It is credit which has made us what we are, and credit which must keep us such. Had the monetary system of Sir R. Peel been adopted forty years ago, as the bullion committee said it should, we shall tell the Right Hon. Baronet what would have been the result. Great Britain would have been a province of France: the fortunes of all its merchants would have been destroyed: the business talents of Mr Jones Loyd would probably have procured for him the situation of cashier of the branch of the Bank of France established in London; and possibly the rhetorical abilities of Sir R. Peel might have raised him to the station of the English M. De Fontaine, the orator on the government side in the British Chamber of Deputies, held under an imperial viceroy on the banks of the Thames. Sir R. Peel admits his bill has failed in checking improvident speculation in the nation; nor could he well have maintained the reverse, when the most extravagant speculations on record, at least in this island, succeeded, in the _very next year_, the passing of his bill. Experience has proved that it required to be suspended by the authority of the executive when the disaster came; and the effect of that suspension has already been to raise the _three per cents_ from 79 to 86. It is ineffective during prosperity to check imprudence; it requires to be suspended in adversity, because it aggravates disaster. This is all on the Right Hon. Baronet's own admission. What good then has it done, or what can be ascribed to it, to counterbalance the numerous evils which have followed in its train?