eans
to promote in this country. They were imposed upon Rome by necessity.
The extension of the empire over Spain, Africa, and Egypt, as well as
the magnanimous policy of its government towards all its subjects,
rendered a free trade in grain with the provinces, and large
importations from the great corn countries, unavoidable. Public
misfortunes, the increasing luxury of the rich, that very great
importation of grain itself, the failure of the Spanish and Grecian
mines, and the entire want of any paper currency to supply the place of
the metals thus largely abstracted, necessarily and unavoidably forced
this calamitous contraction of the currency upon the Roman empire. But
the British policy has adopted the same principles, and done the same
things, when _no necessity_ or external pressure rendered it
unavoidable. A free trade in grain is to be introduced, not in favour of
distant provinces of the empire, but of its neighbours and its enemies.
The currency has been contracted, not by public calamities, or any
deficiency in the means of supplying the failure of the ordinary sources
of gold and silver, but by the fixed determination of government,
carried into execution by repeated acts of Parliament in 1819, 1826, and
1844, to abridge the paper circulation, and deprive the nation of the
benefit of the great discovery of modern times, by which the calamitous
effects of the diminution in the supply of the precious metals
throughout the world have been so materially prevented.

Such a result must appear under all circumstances strange, and would be
inexplicable, if we did not reflect, that the same impulse which was
communicated to the measures of government in Rome by the influence of
the capitalists and the clamorous inhabitants of great towns, is equally
felt in the same stage of society in modern times. The people in our
great cities do not call out, as in ancient days, for gratuitous
distributions of corn from Lybia or Egypt; but they clamour just as
loudly for free trade in grain with Poland and the Ukraine, which has
the effect of swamping the home-grower quite as completely. The great
capitalists do not make colossal fortunes by the plunder of subject
provinces, as in the days of the Roman proconsuls; but they never cease
to exert their influence to procure a contraction of the currency by the
measures of government, which answers the purpose of augmenting their
fortunes at the expense of the industrious classes ju