CHRONICLE OF THE MONTH. FOREIGN. THE war, like some unwieldy monster, drags its slow length along. Successes, which, to Americans, appear much too trifling for the amount of glorification expended upon them in the vicinity of Bow-Bells, Downing street, Printing-House Square, and the Tuileries, have crowned the vast exertions of the Allies in the Crimea. The notable feature of the war for us, however, is its speedy effect upon trade, and the threatened derangement of English and French finances. We can not hug ourselves in the comfortable belief that merchants and traders may fail and smash from Cairo to Cornhill, and leave us intact on this side the Atlantic. The brotherhood, and intimate connection of human interests, is in nothing more strongly developed than in the connections of trade. Time and treaties may draw the boundaries of states. Empires, as such, may exist independently of each other. But mercantile interest is universal as the world. Red and blue lines upon a map, or agreements upon paper or parchment, will not do any thing towards making one mercantile nation independent of another. They constitute a family, and their interests are so nearly allied that to injure one is to injure all. The debits and credits of the mercantile world make Wall street, and the Bourse, Hamburgh and London, mere continuations of each other. True, the shock may be violent in one, and the electric current of misfortune which paralyzes that, may be so far weakened before it reaches the other, as not to stop the vital functions of trade; but it will after all shake them rudely. We have, therefore, to anticipate our share of commercial failure and monetary panic, if the drain of specie from the Bank of England should continue, and a suspension of specie payments occur. It threatens to take that shape already. The steady rise in the rate of discount, and the panic in the money markets of London and Paris, will necessitate it; but it is a desperate remedy. When we hear the intimation; when we read the grave speculations upon its approach, which every mail brings across the Atlantic, we mentally exclaim-Glorious old Andrew Jackson, you need no monument in brass or marble. Your monu ment is in gold; it rises everywhere throughout your country in the specie system, and we can not but think that, of all his victories, the victory over the United States Bank, and the system which made it a State engine, and harnessed the fortunes of the Republic to its "financiers "-stately carriages -was the best and greatest. We are reaping every day the fruits of it, in tranquillity, business stability, and a reliable currency. And what blessing can exceed a reliable and stable currency? To contemplate the misery of an unstable and fluctuating one, a currency acted upon by every political wirepuller; at the mercy of every ministry; dragging the government, or dragged by it to the earth with every fluctuation of trade, crisis of commerce, or reverse of war-is to look upon such a picture of universal misery as makes the stoutest heart recoil, and the firmest hand to tremble. Widow and orphan, tradesman and mechanic, high and low, rich and poor, share in the common misery entailed by the alliance of Bank and State. There can be but one more deadly and pernicious alliance into which the State can enter, and that is with the Church. England to-day is beginning to groan, and cry out, in anticipation of this terrible misery. She is repeating, in 1855, the arguments used in the celebrated "Bullion Committee" of 1811. It is, perhaps, a just retribution that a second national bankruptcy, incurred for the alliance with Napoleon III., should revive the memory of that incurred by her insane hatred of Napoleon I., and the democratic principle he represented. But in whatever æsthetical shape it may present itself, the material one is a depreciated currency and mercantile paralysis. Suppose the bank ceases to pay in specie, and, as during the Continental war, her notes are made legal tender by act of Parliament? Parliament is all powerful. Yes-to pass acts of Parliament; but to alter the laws of trade, weaker than the poorest shoemaker in Piccadilly. If he stick to his last, the laws of trade make him shortly a man well to do. He hammers his lapstone and his leather; he never undertakes to hammer a sixpence into a shilling; or wax-end a Bank of England note into a golden guinea; and truly he sings as he sews, the old ditty: "I'd rather have a guinea than a one-pound note, But Parliament undertakes, by legislative hocus pocus, "hey, presto! change," to make the philosopher's stone, and turn paper into gold. Vain effort. Let them read Mr. Canning before they attempt it again: "Is a depreciated currency the best instrument of foreign exertion ?" (Speech in the Bullion Committee, May 8, 1811). "To the question, How shall our military exertions be best supported? I reply, by supporting the credit of the country; by ascertaining the soundness of our currency, if it be sound; by ascertaining the degree of its defect, if it be defective; with a view, in the one case, to apply a remedy, so far as a remedy may be applicable; and in the other, to fix and settle the public opinion, which, of itself, is no small ingredient in the financial resources of a state." "Some have divested the pound sterling of all the properties of matter, and pursued it, under the name of the ideal unit,' into the regions of nonentity and nonsense. It is assumed that bank notes are an actual equivalent for coin. The argument proves too much. The exportation of coin, or bullion melted from coin, when the exchanges are unfavorable, beyond a certain limit, is looked upon as so much in the natural course of things, that most writers, who have treated of coinage and of trade, have laid it down as a consequence not to be disputed, and not even necessary to be proved. According to the opinions of such writers, the efflux of bullion from one country to another, is governed by causes nearly as steady and uniform in their operation as those which govern the seasons or the tides." It is not, therefore, by bolstering the bank with new enactments, or decreeing, by act of Parliament, that its notes shall be a legal tender for all sums, and not convertible into the precious metals at the holder's option, that England can find the solution of her financial difficulties. Like the Bank of the United States feeding upon American trade, the Bank of England is the vulture, gnawing the vitals of English trade, and every extraordinary concatenation of mercantile affairs must beget a "crisis," and ruin, etc., ad infinitum. The remedy is, Imitation of America - Divorce of Bank and State. Into how much of her misery will England drag us, before she condescends to accept the lesson at our hands? Wall street already feels the influence of her false system, which falls before the first shock. How much farther into our trade will a prolonged war project the shadow which has already fallen upon English commerce? The rise in breadstuffs, and vast market for our surplus, created by the war, and short crops upon the Continent, pours a great accumulation of money into our lap. How much of this is wealth-how much gain? With the rise in price of the necessities of life, labor and all exchangeable commodities must rise to the same level -or very near it. If to the same level, where is the gain? If very near it, on whom does the loss fall? The first question and the second are equally easy to answer. There is no gain to any; but a positive loss to the consumer, a loss which will lay its heaviest burdens upon the backs least able to bear it-upon the operative, upon the man depending upon his daily labor for his daily bread. The financial question is the question of the day. Letter-writers may talk of an increase of English force in the Cuban seas. It is not there she can harm us. It is her false system of finance, reaching, with malignant grasp, the farthest stretch of the world's commerce, and penetrating where her drum never beats, and her flag never intrudes, which is to be dreaded by us. The English Monarchy is money. Russia has found its vital spot. But in stabbing that, she draws also the life-blood from every vein of commerce through which flows the life-blood of the monetary prosperity of all commercial nations. It can not, however, be disguised, that a feeling of soreness exists on the part of the government of Great Britain, with regard to the popular feeling in the United States. They have assumed that our sympathies are actually pro-Russian, and that we are only deterred from a corresponding governmental policy, by our habitual mercantile caution. Whatever the assumption may be worth, its effect must be admitted. Thus an increased naval force is ordered by the English government to the Cuban seas, ostensibly to prevent the possibility of a hostile expedition of Irishmen, directed against Ireland, and set in motion from the United States, with the tacit permission of the government. The supreme injustice of the assumption throws us back upon the simple denial of its possibility under existing circumstances. We keep, as a government, the faith and spirit, as well as the letter, of treaties. If, however, acting upon an opposite principle, the Cabinet of St. James's refuse, as we are led to believe it does refuse, to accept the construction put upon the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, by the Cabinet of Washington; if it adhere to the monstrous pretension of a protectorate over imaginary British Colonies in Central America; if it insist that its flag shall fly at "Blue-fields," as the emblem of British hostility to American influence upon this Continent; if, in short, it madly assume an offensive attitude, and compel the prophecy of discord to work out its own fulfillment-then the consequences of its impolicy must be upon its own head. That the government of Great Britain should seek a rupture with us, in its present financial position; that it should add another, and no mean enemy, to its already overburdened list; that by forcing the Democratic Republic of the world into open antagonism, it should array the democratic sentiment throughout the world against it; that, with a failure of its crops, adding to the extraordinary foreign drain upon its resources in the Russian war, a home drain upon the very life-blood of society, and rendering the most terrible internal commotion imminent; it should cut itself off from the possibility of making up its deficit from the surplus production of the United States, appears a proposition so mad that the mind rejects it by a kind of moral intuition. But, if such a sentiment; if such purposes exist in the mind of Her Majesty's present ministerial advisers; if the dispatch of a force of four hundred guns to our seas be their delicate mode of intimating the "animus” of that ministry and its government towards the United States;-the last link even of an overstrained courtesy which withheld us is broken. Our course becomes plain. The administration must enforce a definite settlement of the Cuban question from the Cabinet of Madrid. It must put our relations with Central America upon an independent basis. It must cut the Gordian knot of English policy on the Mosquito shore, if it can not untie it. If English filibusters are to be protected there, and Her Majesty's consuls are to be made agents for consolidating their conquests into British Possessions in America; the Cabinet of Washington may well ask the Cabinet of St. James's -what the people of the United States will ask them, in a voice not to be mistaken, Why are Americans, who do no more; why are Kinney, and Fabens, and Walker, to be disowned and abandoned? We do not advocate an acknowledgment of them. We do not believe in filibusters, English or American but if England countenances the system, we may well say to her, that people in glass houses should not throw stones. We may well assert an equal right to establish protectorates! war. Without intending a threat, or indulging in gasconade, it may be well for European powers to examine a little more closely than they are disposed to do, the capacity of the United States of America for an offensive or defensive We are rich and out of debt. The treasury groans with a surplus. At the tap of the drum we can have a million of men, passably well drilled, and all inured to hardship, and skillful in the use of arms. We need neither conscription nor extraordinary bounty. Our people are essentially warlike. The only national féte or amusement we have is playing at soldiers. The play and the reality would not be far separated in an emergency. But the chief thing overlooked by European diplomatists is, our capacity for a naval contest. European governments, falsely for themselves, calculate our potential power on the sea by the number of vessels of war in commission, or capable of being put into commission, by the Federal Government. Whereas the fact is, that our naval capacity is the same as our military. The United States has a standing army of 15,000 men, in peace; in war it can have a half a million within a fortnight, volunteers indeed, but not what are understood by volunteers on the other side the Atlantic. Volunteers here mean men voluntarily entering the ranks of the Federal army, well drilled before they go there, and almost every company organized by a brevet-officer from West Point. Thus the so-called volunteers who fought through the late war in Mexico, were, de facto, regular troops, drilled almost into machines, by regular officers, before they went into a single action. It is a fact unknown abroad, too, that one half the best schools in the United States are military schools. The same rule applies to our capacity for naval warfare. The Federal Government may not have twenty available ships; but, let war be declared, and private enterprise will put at its disposition the mightiest fleet of clippers and steamers that ever swept the seas. The majority of our vessels are built with reference to such a contingency, and have little more to do than to ship an armament before they are capable of exchanging their peaceful commercial character for a warlike one. In making a calculation with regard to this hemisphere, the European governments forget to count the people. They weigh the resources of the Federal Government as it is, but forget what it may be when the private resources of the people are added to it. Heaven avert war, is the conscientious cry of every good man and lover of his country or mankind; but Heaven speed the right, and war to the ! |