But assuming that the monetary laws are to continue, and free trade to be persisted in, it will become the people of this country, and _especially the trading classes_, to consider well the inevitable effect of such a state of things on the monetary concerns of the country, and, through them, on the solvency of every one of themselves. We have seen that the heavy rains and large importations of grain in 1839 produced the severe and long-protracted period of distress from 1839 to 1842; and that the potato failure in 1846, acting on the Bank Charter Act of 1844, occasioned the terrible catastrophe of October 1847. But what was the importation of grain, in either of these periods of distress or famine, to that which is now taking place, and has _become habitual in the face of exceedingly low prices_? In 1839, the whole grain of all kinds imported was 4,000,000 quarters, an amount in those days unprecedented. In 1846 and 1847, 12,000,000 quarters, under the stimulus of famine prices, was imported in fifteen months. But now, after a fine harvest, and with wheat at 41s. a quarter, we are importing annually, as our _average amount, fifteen millions of quarters of foreign grain_! How are the most terrible commercial disasters to be averted, if this immense amount receives any augmentation from bad seasons? Nay, how are they to be averted even in ordinary seasons, with so immense a drain on the metallic resources of the country? This is a question in which the mercantile classes are far more interested than the agricultural--for with them a monetary crisis is an affair of life and death. With landholders, cheap prices, unless very long continued, are merely an affair of temporary loss of income, because the land itself remains, and it is the value of the annual fruits only that is affected. To compensate so many perils, past, present, and to come, have free trade and a fettered currency, since they were simultaneously brought into action in this country, afforded such a spectacle of internal prosperity and concord as to render them on the whole worth persisting in, at such hazard to our national independence, and even existence? Alas! the view is now, if possible, more alarming than the prospect of dangers to come, so much have the realised and experienced evils of the new system exceeded what the most sombre imagination, fraught with the most gloomy images, could have anticipated. Amidst the infinite variety of topics bearing on this subject, we select the five following, as bearing decisively on the subject:--The increase of the poor-rate, both in Great Britain and Ireland; the increase in emigration; the increase of crime; the decline in railway travelling, and the ruin of agriculture in Ireland.