Great Britain -- Description and travel; Great Britain -- Rural conditions
It is useless at present to say much about the equivocating and
blundering of the newspapers, relative to the cause of the fall. They
are very shy, extremely cautious; become wonderfully _wary_, with regard
to this subject. They do not know what to make of it. They all remember,
that I told them that their prosperity was delusive; that it would soon
come to an end, while they were telling me of the falsification of all
my predictions. I told them the Small-note Bill had only given a
_respite_. I told them that the foreign loans, and the shares, and all
the astonishing enterprises, arose purely out of the Small-note Bill;
and that a short time would see the Small-note Bill driving the gold out
of the country, and bring us back to another restriction, OR, to wheat
at four shillings a bushel. They remember that I told them all this; and
now, some of them begin to _regard me as the principal cause of the
present embarrassments_! This is pretty work indeed! What! I! The poor
deluded creature, whose predictions were all falsified, who knew nothing
at all about such matters, who was a perfect pedlar in political
economy, who was "a conceited and obstinate old dotard," as that polite
and enlightened paper, the _Morning Herald_, called me: is it possible
that such a poor miserable creature can have had the power to produce
effects so prodigious? Yet this really appears to be the opinion of one,
at least, of these Mr. Brougham's best possible public instructors. The
_Public Ledger_, of the 16th of November, has the following passage:--
"It is fully ascertained that the Country Banking Establishments in
England have latterly been compelled to limit their paper circulation,
for the writings of Mr. COBBETT are widely circulated in the
Agricultural districts, and they have been so successful as to induce
the _Boobies_ to call for gold in place of country paper, a circumstance
which has _produced a greater effect on the currency than any
exportation of the precious metals_ to the Continent, either of Europe
or America, could have done, although it too must have contributed to
render money for a season scarce."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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