"The present panic and distress in the country have been declared by high authority to proceed from ‘overtrading’ and ‘wild speculation.’ Infant nations and establishments are liable to miscarry from want of experience and solidity. TRADING and SPECULATION, being natives of this island, and parents of our wealth and independence, are surely exempt from such an imputation. The same authority has declared, that ‘gold and paper money are incompatible with each other, and cannot exist together.’ _The population and trade of the empire having been much increased, a proportionate increase in the medium of circulation is called for_; and when gold is found insufficient, recourse must be had to paper, which if improved on the principle already suggested, the two substances would be found in the same pocket without disunion. “Anxious to see our situation ameliorated, I trust the currency may be mended without changing or impairing the national commercial character--which measure, if resorted to, would resemble the policy of diverting from its course a powerful river that had long given fertility and happiness to a large district, merely because, from excessive rains, it had sometimes exceeded its natural limits, and produced partial injury.” A sounder and a clearer view of the sole legitimate control which government is entitled, for security of the public, to exercise over the issues of the bankers, cannot be found than this. The elder baronet was fully alive to the gross absurdity of the bullionists who literally make toys of their coin. He recognised to its fullest extent the salutary principle that REAL PROPERTY is, after all, the only proper basis of circulation: and he would have laughed to scorn the idea of an arbitrary restricted issue, as the certain means of inflicting a paralytic stroke upon the energies and the enterprise of the nation. The total neglect of this view is the capital error of the son. He depreciates the value of real property, by depriving its possessor of the power to command at any time its cheap and commodious representative; and he forces us, under the most adverse circumstances to hunt for gold, and not improbably to humiliate ourselves in time of need, by an application to the hoarding Russian.