The observation is a fair one, and apparently of material weight in the great question now at issue in the nation. When properly considered, it gives no countenance to the free-trade measures which the right hon. baronet has introduced, but only shows that it is to the combination of those measures, with another element of still more general and potent agency, that the disaster has been owing. In the interval, be it recollected, between 1842 and 1846, _the new currency restriction bills were passed_. The Bank Charter Bill of England received the royal assent in 1844, that of Scotland and Ireland in 1845. Free trade in grain was introduced in July 1846; in sugar, in May 1847; in shipping, in May 1849. The harvests of the years from 1846 to 1849 have been, as usual in this climate, checkered: that of 1846 was fair in grain, but sadly deficient in potatoes; that of 1847 was above an average in both; that of 1848, deficient in the south of England in corn; that of 1849, generally very good. The years from 1842 to 1846, therefore, were not a trial of free trade and a restricted currency, _acting simultaneously_--they were a trial only of _semi_-free trade, without the new monetary laws, coexisting with a railway mania in the palmy days of its progress, and other favourable circumstances, which concealed, as will be immediately shown, its actual tendency. Real free trade has begun to act, _along with a restricted currency, for the first time, in 1846_. The harvests since have been, on the whole, average ones--neither better nor worse than generally may, in this variable climate, be expected in future years. It is since 1846, therefore, that we are to look, in this climate, for the real proof of the effects of the _combined free-trade and currency measures_ which Sir Robert Peel has introduced; and unless they are taken together, the practical tendency of both will be entirely misunderstood. The right hon. baronet has done a great service to the cause of truth, by pointing out the difference in the state of the country before and after 1846; and we shall endeavour to follow up the subject by tracing the difference to its real source, and endeavouring to detach from the question the simultaneous circumstances which have been so often referred to as explaining the phenomena. The inquiry is the more important, that the Protection party as a body have, with a few striking and illustrious exceptions, never seen the currency question in its true light, as accompanied with that of free trade, and, by not doing so, have both voluntarily relinquished the most powerful lever wherewith to shake the strength of their opponents, and failed in instructing the public mind either in the real causes of their sufferings, or the means by which they are likely to be, alleviated.