after the China Treaty, so great a prospect was held out to the country of a great extension of our commerce with China, that there were many large mills built with a view to that trade exclusively, in order to manufacture that class of cloth which is principally taken for the China market.... This trade turned out most ruinous; the losses averaged from 10 to 60 or 70 per cent.”[71] This is a fact which may be commended to the attention of a powerful Party in the latter years of the Queen’s reign which cherishes the perfectly erroneous belief, that an aggressive foreign policy necessarily and invariably stimulates commerce by “opening up new markets.” No issue of paper money in 1847-48 could relieve a strain due to such causes as these, though some blame must be given to the Bank for not checking the drain of gold by raising the discount rate at the beginning of the year, when the failure of the potato crop in Ireland was manifest. But to issue £2,000,000 of notes without any increase in the real capital of the country, which could alone command foreign produce, would have been an illusory measure of relief. The heated discussions on these and cognate questions ended in May; in June the pressure on the Money Market began to be relaxed, and the crisis passed away for the time--only to reappear, as we shall see, later on in the autumn. The Education Vote in 1847 raised a great storm of sectarian controversy, not only in Parliament, but throughout the country. The first sign that the State in England gave of awakening to the educational destitution of the country was in 1833, when the House of Commons voted £20,000 in aid of elementary public instruction. In a burst of generosity, £39,000 was voted in 1839. In 1845 the grant was raised to £100,000, but the money could only be shared by Protestant schools, because the Privy Council decreed that no school was to be subsidised unless “the Authorised Version of the Scriptures” was read in it. This of course cut off the Roman Catholics from any participation in the grant; and when, in 1847, the Education Vote came before the House of Commons, all liberal-minded men condemned the sectarian restrictions in dispensing the grants which were imposed by the Government. Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Macaulay, and Sir W. Molesworth all attacked the regulation of the Council, which pressed so harshly against the Roman Catholics; and Lord John Russell was fain to give pledges that the rule would be relaxed. During these debates, some of the High Church Tories, like Sir Robert Inglis, the Member for the University of Oxford, accused Peel of supporting the policy of Toleration in order to conciliate Catholic voters at the coming election. It is curious to note that the plan of the Government, offering equal pecuniary aid on equal terms to all schools accepting Government inspection, was opposed by the Dissenters; and even Mr. Bright declared that it was a dangerous