While this deplorable prostration of the interests of industry in all its manufacturing branches has taken place, _no corresponding general decline in prices has occurred_. The producer has in too many cases been ruined, but the consumers have not as yet at least been benefited. In some branches of manufacture, indeed, a most frightful depreciation of value has taken place. Silks, muslins, and ladies' dresses are now selling for half of what they were a year and a half ago. But that is the effect of the French revolution, which has thrown such an immense quantity of articles of this description into the British market, and of the unparalleled number of failures amongst ourselves, which have forced such prodigious masses of stock, belonging to sequestered estates, to sale. These bankruptcies, and the ruinous contraction of the currency which has occasioned them, afford too satisfactory an explanation of the depressed prices in most of the staple articles of British manufacture. But in those articles which are not so dependent on the maintenance of commercial credit, and in which the good effects of free-trade might have been expected to appear, unmitigated by its attendant disasters, no diminution of price is perceptible. The last harvest was so fine, that a public thanksgiving was offered for the blessing; and it came on the back of the importation of £31,000,000 worth of foreign grain, or above 12,000,000 quarters in the preceding fifteen months: but the price of wheat is still 51s. a quarter, and that of oats and barley yet higher in proportion. Oxen and sheep, as well as all kinds of provisions, have been imported to an enormous extent during last year;[2] so great, indeed, as to make the able writers in the _Times_ apprehend that they had drained away the whole currency of the country in exchange; but butcher meat is still 7d. a pound. The West Indies are irrecoverably and finally ruined, but we are paying 5d. and 6d. a pound for our slave-grown Cuba and Brazil sugar. The _Banker's Circular_ of May 2, 1848, asks whether there was ever heard of before a monetary crisis which "had _lasted a year_?" but no man, during that year of fine harvest, general peace, and universal suffering, has found that his household expenses have experienced the least diminution from what they were during the previous years of protected industry, wide-spread contentment, and unbroken prosperity. Free-trade is evidently driving some of the staple branches of British industry out of the field; one is expiring in the West Indies, another languishing in Manchester, a third tottering in Glasgow; and the diminution of home production keeping pace with the increase of foreign supply, prices remain what they were--domestic is superseded by foreign industry; and we shall have the satisfaction of finding that we have ruined many staple branches of our own manufacture without benefiting any class of our people. [2] Imported from January 5 to October 10--