ting medium, separating it from such capital, can be superabundant. Granting, however, that the issues of banknotes, considered separately, can be excessive, they must operate as an excess of trading capital; and we deny that there can be such an excess of such capital, for a term of years, as will keep prices constantly high. An excess of such capital must always, in the nature of things, resolve itself at once into an excess of goods, dissipate itself, and create a scarcity of money and low prices. At any rate, high prices are a certain indication of prosperity; they cannot possibly exist in a poor and distressed nation. If bank-notes raise them at all, they can do it in no other way than by increasing trade and employment for labour. If gold reduce them it must inevitably do it by diminishing trade, and depriving labour of employment. Low prices can only be found in a poor and suffering country; a rich and thriving one they cannot enter. That a metallic currency will greatly reduce prices for a time is certain. At a period when a vast number of trading capitals have been wholly lost when the capital of almost every trader has been seriously reduced--when every bank has had its capital greatly diminished by the withdrawal of deposits, or other causes -at such a time, an immense sum must be taken from the capitals of the banks, and the use and profits of it lost to the community. The change itself will force prices down, and then their lowness will prevent the accumulation of balances of account and deposits, which form so large a part of the trading capital of every banker. The banking capital of the nation will be less reduced by the withdrawal of the notes, than by the loss of such balances of accounts and deposits. Prices, however, will still fluctuatethey will be at times very high-but then they will be raised, not generally by the beneficial effects of prosperity, but partially by the injurious consequences of scarcity. Every Member of Parliament, whatever his creed may be, protests that he is the enemy of high prices. If this country, with its tremendous debt, which is kept so carefully from diminution, can prosper with low prices, in heaven's name let us have them! But we say that it cannot-we say that, if prices be not reasonably high, this nation cannot employ its labour, reduce its debt, and pay its taxes. We say further, that high prices cannot outlive public prosperity that low ones cannot outlive national poverty and suffering-that, in so far as a paper currency raises prices, it raises them by promoting trade and creating employment for labour, and that it never can raise them permanently above what public prosperity calls for. We maintain, that, if the banks contributed to produce the present distress by making advances to the merchants, &c., they were enabled to make these advances chiefly by the solid capital which was placed in their hands by their connexions. We maintain that this distress was mainly produced, not by excessive issues of notes by the bankers, but by a superabundance of real unborrowed capital possessed by other members of the community. It is said that a paper currency, instead of expanding, contracts itself in times of trading suffering, and that a gold one does the reverse. This is sad drivelling. How does a paper currency contract itself? The market becomes heavy-prices fall-the traders are all rendered poor-confidence is shaken-the bankers hear unfavoura ble reports, and dare not continue to discount and lend as they have done. Would the case be different with a gold currency? Would the bankers lend to suspected houses, and discount doubtful bills, merely because their money would consist of sovereigns instead of bank-notes? We think not. A run upon a country bank throws in its paper, but then it takes out gold instead; it takes away a large portion of the Bank's capital in the shape of deposits, &c. but then it would do just the same if the Bank had no notes. Low prices and distress throw a large part of the currency out of employment, whether it consist of gold or paper. The fall of the market price of gold does not make it more cheap and plentiful to those who want to borrow it. Our conviction is, that a sufficiency of gold cannot be kept in the country. The balance of trade is only in our favour with those countries that cannot send us any gold, and that pay their debts to us with goods. With France and those countries that really have gold, the balance of trade, from the new system, will be almost always against us, and we shall have to pay them with gold. What has been the case recently? The Bank called in its small notes and issued sovereigns: almost immediately, the latter began to go abroad, and their export increased, until it excited the most serious alarm. This was the case when only two millions of the population were supplied with gold. If the nation enjoy a few months of prosperity, the sovereigns will fly abroad for the purchase of foreign manufactures; the bankers will set to work to bring down prices, and produce bankruptcy and distress, in order to disable the community from buying outlandish silks and other foolery. If the nation cannot possess gold without keeping itself continually in penury and suffering, we think it would be better without it; we think it would act wisely in cleaving to its paper. Our notions are eminently unphilosophical. We would at any time prefer roast-beef and plum-pudding with bank-notes, to salt and potatoes with sovereigns. We wish for that circulating medium, without giving ourselves any concern touching its description, that will give to our country the greatest measure of prosperity and happiness. The Philosophers of Parliament are prodigiously puzzled to account for the fact, that country bank-notes force sovereigns out of circulation. They charge it, with their usual ignorance, upon the country bankers. The truth is, that excepting philosophers, all men, and especially men in business, prefer that circulating medium which is the most convenient. The notes of country bankers are scarcely ever counterfeited-there is no trouble in weighing them they are more portable and the risk is very trifling, for it is only two or three times in a man's life that one bank, amidst several, fails in a particular district. Notes are almost universally preferred to gold, and that is the reason why they keep it out of circulation. Let the circulating medium of the country be Bank of England notes-let forged ones be pretty plentiful-let sovereigns be of full weight and free from counterfeits, and then gold will drive paper out of circulation. With regard to Scotland, here is a country in which Bank failures are unknown, which for a very long period has drawn the most signal advantages from a paper currency, which is in circumstances very different from those of England, and of which the inhabitants, almost to a man, protest against the change. Now, why is a positive, long-tried, and highly-valued good, to be thus wrenched from Scotland, not only without necessity, but without anything whatever to excuse it? Why is Scotland to be thus crammed by main force into the rucible of experiment, when it cannot even be alleged that she will derive the least benefit from it? With regard to Ireland, the want of banks and capital in it has been long lamented. Yet now a measure is resorted to that must prevent the spread of banks in it, and the introduction of that capital which they would circulate. Who can contemplate without shuddering, the effects that low prices must produce in Ireland? We are an unaccountable people. Banks have long been carried up as things of inestimable public value; and the banker who has been liberal in his advances, has been always praised as a benefactor to his country. All things must now be made new, and therefore banks are spoken of as though they were public evils, and the banker, who is generous in making loans, is thought to be little better than a traitor. We have boasted of our capital until we are weary, and now we are execrating it, and sighing for the benefits that the loss of it will yield us. We shall soon be somewhat wiser than we are. We shall soon find, that if we have banks at all, we must have the evils that are inseparable from them ; and that a crash cannot take place amidst merchants and manufac turers, without its producing a crash amidst bankers. We shall soon find that if we have riches, we must have with them the evils that are insepara ble from riches. We shall soon discover that the want of capital is even a more grievous thing than the excess of it-that occasional paroxysms of gout are to be preferred to the neverceasing effects of atrophy-and that the pains produced by high living are more endurable than the gnawings of eternal hunger. We shall soon be heartily sick of experiments-Would to God that we could as soon get rid of their consequences! RUSSIA. FROM the middle of the 18th century, the characteristic of Europe was War. All the great changes were made by violence. In the earlier portion of this ardent and sanguinary period, all the leading states were successively broken into the discipline and sufferings of war, as if to prepare them for that more tremendous hostility, which, before its close, was to involve all in one common conflict. Till then the political hemisphere was but partially darkened; the flash struck a solitary throne from time to time, and dismantled it of some of its more aspiring and useless ornaments; but the French Revolution brought down the whole storm. It was the consummation of the Age of the Sword. When a historian worthy of this splendid and fearful period shall arise, we shall have a history such as the world has not yet equalled; a singular and majestic development of the noblest powers exhausted in the most disastrous struggle against public misfortune, of the most desperate passions let loose and triumphing, of whole nations flung into combat with each other, of slaughter and sufferings to which all the ancient trials of empire were tame, of magnificent heroism overpowered, of established strength, the constitutions of a thousand years scattered like dust under the charge of a licentious and uncontrollable force, of the fall of thrones and religions, and of the finishing of this gigantic, moral, and public battle in a state of knowledge, progressive freedom, and general tranquillity, beyond all hope and all example. Whether this illustrious prospect is to go on extending and brightening, or whether the casual heavings that still shake it are to be deepened into ruin, must be left to Time. We have attained one great wisdom, the consciousness that all war, for the sake of domineering, brings with it its own scourge. The experiment of ambition has been made before our age on the grandest scale, with the most unequalled qualities for success, and with the most resistless progress. No nation will ever make an universal war with faculties equal to those of the nation which we have just seen tramVOL. XIX. pled down in its own blood by the feet of the whole continent. No man will, perhaps, ever stand forth as the leading figure of war, superior in energy, subtlety, knowledge of man, and military renown, to the man whom we have just sent to his grave with our fetters on his hands. There may be greater generals, more sagacious statesmen, more heroic defiers of personal danger; but the world has never seen a chieftain so fitted for the mastery of his peculiar nation and his peculiar time. No empire will, perhaps, ever see at the head of its strength, a being so formed by nature and circumstance, to excite all its hidden means, to strain the national sinews to their utmost energy, to lead his people against the world with the enthusiasm of individual passion, and the solid weight of disciplined and matchless combination. Napoleon was an Evil, and human nature may well rejoice at the extinction of its disturber. He was a portentous light in the horizon; but for his hour he threw all its other illumination into eclipse. If it had been the declared will of Heaven to show us the fruitlessness of human ambition, by an evidence on the most unanswerable scale, we can imagine no more complete conviction than of that tremendous throne which has scarcely yet disappeared from before our eyes; no more appalling power than that which France threw out from her torn entrails like a stream of fire upon the earth; no more potent, presiding spirit of the ruin, than her Emperor. France and Napoleon were made for each other-we shall see nothing like them meet together again. But this crisis was still more remarkable in the change which it has wrought on the locality of Dominion. Half a century ago, the strength of Europe was in its centre. France was the heart of the continent; the manners, language, literature of Europe, even down to the trivial matters of dress and the things of common life, were modelled on those of this supreme and brilliant teacher. The politics of France were the guide or the fear of every nation; and the ministers of half a hundred courts laid 3 L their heads on their pillows in quiet, or wasted their lamps, as the dispatches from Versailles bore the stamp of its resistless will. But this has passed away. In the seat of the conflagration the strength of the soil has been burnt out. Two great empires, on the western and eastern borders of civilization, now hold the supremacy over all between. England and Russia, ordained to present the most total contrast to each other. The one at the height of constitutional freedom, the other at the height of despotism; the one the most cultivated and opulent of all nations, the other the poorest and most barbarous; the one strong in the strength of its people, the other peopled with slaves; the one irresistible by sea, the other scarcely venturing to dip the sole of its feet in that uncertain element, but mighty by land. They agree in but the one feature, of an extensibility of power all but boundless. Russia has before her a sweep of territory in which the whole population would be lost; and from Lapland to the Chinese wall, her flag may yet wave over cities and tribes innumerable. England has before her the alliance, or the conquest of every state washed by the ocean. Of all sceptres the trident is the most imperial. From the Poles to the Line, and from America to India, all is but one superb field for her activity, her genius, and her glory. What shall be the final result of these immense concentrations of power is yet beyond human conjecture. Whether they have been raised by Providence in the foresight of some overwhelming catastrophe of the intermediate nations, to be made, still more strikingly than before, the refuge to the crushed and perishing interests of humanity-whether they have been elevated, like Mount Ararat, for the rest and forthcoming of the new cultivators of the deluged and subverted soil, or are themselves to evince the tremendous spectacle of the utmost power of human hostility in their collision, is still covered with clouds impenetrable. But the rise and growth of Russia is a phenomenon to which the world has afforded no parallel. The empire of Peter the Great is but a century old.* The savage boldness and wild wisdom of that first of barbarians even then caught the gaze of the philosophers of Europe. He gave Russia a place among kingdoms. He laid the colossal foundations of a colossal empire. But he died among the foundations. His plan survived him. His successors in all the vices of an Asiatic court, and the fantasies of female reigns, still added to his great design. Catherine the Second, a woman with the ambition, the intellect, and the crimes of the sterner sex, struck down all resistance within sight of her borders--with one hand held the Ottoman like a tiger in a chain, and with the other crushed out the life of Poland. It was a minor work to subdue the Tartar invasions, and break down the insurrections of the pretenders and turbulent nobles. Catherine made Russia, like its own winter, terrible. Yet these terrors were, like it, restricted; they were lost as it passed the limits of the soil. The appearance of the Russian armies in the "Seven Years' War" was but of a moment; they came like Arabs from the desert, as if only to show the fierceness and untameable strength of their source, and then passed away. The true intercourse of Russia with the system of Europe began with the accession of the late Emperor. Before the time of Alexander, the throne was Oriental in its ambition, its polity, and its feelings; it was Russia in Asia. From the commencement of his reign it became Russia in Europe. The increase of population during this period was unexampled, or only to be equalled by that of North America. By the register of the births and deaths of the Greek Church, its population was about thirty millions. But the Greek Church contains but three-fourths of the whole; and the true census would have been forty. At his death, the population was estimated at fifty-four millions! The Empire now contains nearly seven millions of square leagues, of which a fourth is extremely fertile. The Ural mountains are the great natural divisions of the population. Seven-eighths live on the western side of the range. The eastern side is wandered over by tive mil St Petersburg was founded in 1703. lions of men of various habits and languages. Yet those presumed Tartarian deserts may yet be reckoned among the treasures of the imperial strength. Unreclaimed as they are, they present a vast surface in general fit for supporting life, some tracts of remarkable luxuriance, large rivers, and a climate which, though chiefly rigorous, is healthy. Those plains were once the "Officina gentium," the inexhaustible magazine of the hosts which covered alternately the East and West of the world. The Scythian was the mightiest of conquerors. He recruited his multitudes in a wilderness where he was as inaccessible as its storms. When the power of devastation was swelled to its height in the desert, it rushed forth, and India and Italy were overwhelmed before it returned to its ancient pool among the mountains of the Ural. Alexander died on the first of December, 1825; he was born on the 23d of the same month, 1777, the son of Paul the First and Maria, daughter of Eugene, Duke of Wirtemberg. His grandmother, the celebrated Catherine the Second, distrusting the capacity of her capricious son, was said to have looked to Alexander for the hope of Russia. Suspicious in everything, she chose a wife, Louisa Maria of Baden, for him at the age of sixteen, and thus precipitated an union which was productive of happiness to neither, and, what was of more consideration to the fierce old woman that forced it, productive of no issue. The was Alexander ascended the throne on the 24th of March, 1801. He began his reign by the most popular of all acts, a peace with England. famous "Armed Neutrality" from that moment dissolved. Lord St Helens was sent to the imperial court. The embargo on the British ships was taken off on the 18th of May. A maritime convention between England and Russia was established on the 17th of June, thus distinctly abolishing the convention agreed on between Sweden, Denmark, and Russia, but a year before, (December 16, 1800,) and for maintenance of which the Danish fleet had been attacked and all but ruined by Nelson. The peace between England and France immediately followed, (October 1.) Russia first entered as a component part into German politics in 1802. The ambition of Napoleon, inflamed by triumph, had now commenced those projects, which made peace but a more treacherous mode of conquest. The indemnifications of the German sovereignties, gave him the opportunity for which he thirsted; and Prussia, conscious that the first blow would be at her supremacy of Northern Germany, called Russia to her councils. The result of this intercourse was known only in the significant measure of a levy of two men in the five hundred through the Russian empire, and the completion of the army to half-amillion. The time of the most signal struggle of the modern world was now at.hand. Napoleon, in sight of the crown, and feeling that peace was the season in which alone he could be forgotten or overpowered by the factions of France, determined to throw the whole West into war. By a series of aggressions on the treaty, by positive seizures of territory, and direct insults to England, he aroused that greatest and most fatal of all his antagonists into hostility. The war began in the commencement of 1803. The extraordinary scheme, which was afterwards urged to its completion, in her Berlin and Milan Decrees, now began with the seizure of Hanover, and the exclusion of English commerce from the coasts of the North Sea. Alexander, connected by family ties with Oldenburg, and probably feeling some personal pity for the helpless sufferings of Hanover, interceded. His intercession was rejected, and the offended monarch still went on disciplining his armies. In 1804, Napoleon was crowned Emperor of France. His first act was to dip his sceptre in blood. The murder of the Duke d'Enghien was his savage pledge to the Jacobinism that had raised him to the height on which he stood, that he was always the same. It has been long since acknowledged, that this was a gratuitous act of murder, unpalliated by even the miserable excuses of state necessity. It was the mere sealing of a bond of guilt and barbarism with the regicides of the Revolution. As the Republic had begun with the bloodshed of a Bourbon, so should the Empire. Children of the same godless faith, they |