XXII. 1830. CHAP, which at that time animated the House of Commons, and so exhibited a contrast, he regretted to say, to the degeneracy in the present time, when, within and without that House, no repugnance is shown to a total departure from those just principles upon which Mr Pitt mainly relied to conquer our impending difficulties. 37. "The proposed reduction of taxation is £3,400,000. Continued. It is provided for by £2,667,000, being the existing surplus of income over expenditure, by £330,000 a-year from the increased duty on spirits, and £110,000 from stamps. The whole would amount to £3,070,000; leaving £330,000 a-year to be still provided for, after applying to the reduction every farthing of the Sinking Fund. We have lived to see the time when a minister appeared in the House, and, after frittering away, on one pretence or another, all the benefits which were hoped to be drawn from the Sinking Fund, finally proposed to sweep away altogether the income laid by for its maintenance! Means might and should have been found to support this fund; but if we are to adopt the doctrines expounded in the market-place-if we are not to look at the consequence of being compelled to go to war, but, on the contrary, to obey the recommendations, and chime in with the prejudices, and act according to the political wisdom to be heard at Penenden Heath, or in the market-place at Chelmsford, then the credit, the honour, the interest, and the power of this country must ultimately sink with the weakness which permitted the House to listen to such suggestions. Mr Pitt, when he established the Sinking Fund, had declared that no minister would ever have the confidence to come down to the House, and propose the repeal of a measure the tendency of which was to relieve the people of their burdens; and that to suffer that fund at any time, or on any pretence, to be diverted from its proper object, would be to ruin, defeat, and overturn the whole plan. He hoped, therefore, that the House would hold itself solemnly pledged never to listen XXII. 1830. iv. § 81. to any proposal for its repeal on any pretence whatever.' CHAP. Yet after, during a long course of years, the Sinking Fund had been frittered away on various pretences, it is 1 Parl. Hist. now proposed to abolish it entirely, and leave the debt xxv. 1309. for ever a crushing burden upon the nation, by appropriating the whole surplus, and more than the surplus, to the remission of taxation. Even if the modified Sinking Fund of £5,000,000 yearly, which Parliament so solemnly pledged itself, in 1819, to keep up inviolate, 22 Ante, c. had been maintained, the House would now have had a surplus of above £7,000,000 to apply to the reduction of debt, and instead of entertaining a proposal for the reduction of interest on the Four per Cents, the whole of the debt at this moment might have been converted into terminable annuities, and its entire extinction insured at no distant period." These remarks made no sort of impression, and the ministerial budget, repealing taxes to such an extent as to extinguish the last remnant of the Sinking Parl. Deb. Fund, passed without a division, amidst a chorus of ap- 327; Ann. probation from both sides of the House, and in particular 82, 84. the warmest applause from the Liberal opposition. 3 3 Reg. 1830, on the aban the Sinking We have now reached a turning-point in English 38. history that when the Sinking Fund was practically Reflections abandoned, and the nation voluntarily took the whole donment of public debt as a permanent and irremovable burden on Fund. itself. That this has been the case is evident from this decisive fact, that the unredeemed debt was considerably less in this year than it was in 1854, when the Russian war broke out! * Three-and-twenty years of unbroken Continental peace has been attended with no other effect than adding eight millions to the national debt-although, during the fifteen preceding years, mutilated as the Sinking Fund had been by successive administrations, a very -PORTER'S Parliamentary Tables, i. 6; and Finance Tables, 1853. XXII. 1830. CHAP. sensible reduction in this debt had been effected, for it had been diminished by seventy-five millions.* It is a melancholy reflection that twenty-three years of subsequent peace has brought only an increase of the debt, and that its redemption is now, by common consent, regarded as hopeless. It is the more so, when it is recollected that the Sinking Fund, at the close of the war, amounted to £15,000,000 annually; and that, if it had not been subsequently broken upon by successive administrations, it would have entirely extinguished the debt by the year 1845.1 1 Hist. of Europe, c. xli. § 24. 39. from the repeal of It is easy to see to what this great change, fraught Which arose with such vast and irreparable effects upon the future destinies and ultimate fate of the British empire, has direct taxes. been, in the first instance, owing. It arose from the repeal of so large a portion of the indirect taxes, which, according to Mr Pitt's policy, were to have been kept as a sacred resource, never to be trenched upon, so far as they were necessary to provide for the Sinking Fund. The direct taxes, universally felt as so oppressive, were never intended by him to be prolonged beyond the termination of the war. To such an extent has this system of abandoning the indirect taxes, the sole support of the Sinking Fund, been carried by successive administrations, all bidding against each other in the race for popularity, that these repeals amounted, between 1815 and 1830, to £17,507,356,* clear indirect taxes remitted, after taking into view what had been imposed during the same period. Lt was impossible that so vast a reduction, coinciding with the additional remission of £15,000,000 direct property-tax during the same period, could take place without altogether extinguishing the Sinking Fund, which was based entirely upon those indirect taxes, and thereby inflicting a fatal and irrecoverable wound upon the whole financial system of the nation. CHAP. XXII. 1830. 40. occasioned the cur It is the more surprising that this great reduction of indirect taxes should have been carried through by every which was successive administration which succeeded to the helm of by the conaffairs, when it is recollected that the Government shared traction of to the very full in the embarrassment so strongly felt in reney. the country. There was no farmer, manufacturer, or weaver more embarrassed for money, in proportion to their resources, than the Treasury was during the greater part of this period. There must obviously have been * INDIRECT TAXES REPEALED AND LAID ON, FROM 1816 TO 1830, BOTH XXII. 1830. CHAP. some great cause constantly in operation from 1815 to 1830, which prompted a course so much at variance with the present interests of Government, and fraught with such danger to the ultimate financial prospects of the country. Nor is it difficult to see what this cause was. The threatened resumption of cash payments by the Bank in 1816, the completed resumption in 1819, the suppression of small notes by the bill of 1826, did the whole. They created an overbearing necessity which nothing could withstand. Prices having been lowered above 50 per cent by these measures, and at least £150,000,000 annually cut off-save in 1818, 1824, and 1825 when the currency was expanded-from the remuneration of industry throughout the country, while debts and money obligations remained the same, it was impossible to maintain the former indirect taxes any more than the direct ones. Diminution of burdens became a state necessity to which everything, even the ultimate existence of the nation, required to yield. The taxes remitted, indeed, were little compared to the remuneration of industry cut off, but still they were something, and their remission at least removed the bitterest ingredient in the cup of misery, that of having its sufferings disregarded. 41. produced the cry for Reform. It soon appeared, however, that the destruction of the Which also Sinking Fund was not to be the only effect produced by the contraction of the currency, and its being based entirely on gold, which by no possibility could be always retained. The sufferings of the industrial classes also made themselves known in a still more audible manner; and with the disappearance of small notes from the circulation in England, commenced the CRY FOR Reform, which soon came to supersede all other cries, and produced such a ferment in the country as changed, first the administration, and then the constitution. The people, engaged in industrial pursuits, were so universally involved in distress that they would bear it no longer. They had petitioned the legislature for inquiry and relief, over and |