crying with cold.'" (See Westminster Rev. for July, 1841.)

But how would the great body of the American people suffer even if coal were dear, so long as they use wood for their fuel, and not coal. Not one man in a hundred makes any use of coal, or will for a long time to come. Millions of acres of forests are yet to be felled before wood can be expensive, except in some small portions of the Eastern States. And yet this writer boldly declares that the average coal tax upon the American labourer is $2 40 a year. This is almost as near the truth as his corn law statistics. Since it happens that this tax on coal, which at $2 40 to each working person and his family of four, including himself, would amount to only about twice as much as all the coal consumed in the United States sells for! (See Com. Dic. article coal.)

This coal calculation is on a par with his next estimate, that the" United States lose $40,000000 every year by manufacturing their goods instead of importing them"-and M'Culloch agrees with him, he tells us. If so, how does he reconcile it with his declarations so often made, that the immense increase of the wealth of England within the last fifty years, is attributable chiefly to the unparalleled growth of her manufactures. It is rather inexplicable to my mind, I confess, that England should double her wealth in half a century by her manufactories, and the

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United States lose forty millions a year by the same process! This country is the wrong place for him to try to make such political economy as this popular, while we are suffering a commercial prostration, brought upon us by an extravagant prodigality, which has within the last six years contracted a debt of several hundred million dollars in Europe-by which we have for some time to come secured to ourselves the mortification of losing our credit abroad, and securing the distress we feel at home. And yet at such a crisis he proclaims the following doctrine in our ears. "It has been customary to call a balance of imports beyond exports an unfavourable balance; but modern principles of political economy have shown that the reverse is the correct deduction. We know that every merchant thinks so. We should consider that man in an unsound state of mind who should boast that his trade had been this year most prosperous, for he had actually sold $500,000 worth and received $400,000 in exchange. If any man was to make this statement in company, would he get a single individual to join him in his self-gratification? Certainly not. And what is beneficial to individuals is beneficial to the whole community."

This is another striking specimen of our author's mode of reasoning. Does he not know that it is bad economy for individuals or nations to run into debt. That when our imports exceed our exports we do run in debt? That these debts must be paid or repudiated? What has impoverished

the United States, and rendered us bankrupts for the time, but buying of other nations more than they were willing to buy in return? He will not deny, that for nine years, ending with 1839, we imported every year vastly more than we exported, and during the whole period we had contracted a debt of nearly $250,000,000. Now, according to his system, we should have grown rich by the process of buying more than we paid for and rich too, in just the proportion we involved ourselves in debt to Europe. But we have at last awaked from the dream of extravagance and found ourselves on the verge of ruin. England was anxious enough to sell us her manufactured goods, but she would not let us pay for them with the products of our own labour. She excluded our grain from her ports-she only admitted our tobacco on condition of our paying a duty of over 900 per cent. Our true policy would have been to purchase no more of her than she would part with in exchange for our own products, and to have manufactured the balance at home, which we were fully able to do thereby putting hundreds of millions of dollars into the hands of our own labourers, rather than sending four thousand miles to get the work done. We should then have saved ourselves the disastrous consequences which have followed-an enormous debt to England-loss of credit abroad-and repudiation and prostration of manufactures-and indeed every branch of industry, at home. But

with an insanity unparalleled in the history of nations, we rushed into debt without bestowing a thought upon the future, or making any adequate provision for the discharge of our obligations.

But "Libertas" is the last man who should reproach Mississippi for repudiating her State Debts. She has acted upon the very policy he recommended, and in so doing has brought herself to her present condition of poverty and humiliation. She never would have been reduced to this state of vassalage and dishonour if she had incurred no greater obligation every year than her cotton would have discharged. But she expended more than her income, and now she, and indeed the whole nation, find themselves precisely in the condition of hundreds of private individuals who have rashly plunged into debt;-expended their money faster than they made it, and heaped up obligations they could not discharge. When the delusion passes away, and the day of reckoning comes, the spend-thrift prodigal, confounded with his extravagance, and hopeless for the issue, applies the sponge of repudiation to solemn claims, and turning on his heel, tells his creditors they must never trouble him about his debts:-he too acted the part of folly, while every body else was playing the fool;-received little or no advantage from the goods he purchased, or the money he borrowed, and now he must take shelter under a Bankrupt Law, (which legalizes his fraud) if it is not too much trouble, and if it is, why, he can get

along without it, (for there is no more of a cat than her skin,) and he takes a long breath, dismisses all trouble about the past, turns over a new leaf and opens a cash account with the world at last; for the best reason in the world, do business on no other principles. the result of running in debt,-of not what is purchased.

he can now All this is paying for

But this is not the greatest inconsistency in this argument; in trying to support a structure built upon sand, its author is driven into a greater blunder still. He attempts to show that no draft is made upon us for our specie to pay our foreign debt, and that the amount of gold and silver in America, increased the more our debt augmented. I well know such fictions are too feeble to stand even against the assertion of a merchant's clerk; but since I have gone thus far in exposing his folly I will finish the work. He says that from 1832 to 1838 while our imports greatly exceeded our exports, some $55,000,000 in specie, were brought into the country, more than was carried out. If it were so what would it prove? Only that our credit was so good abroad during thattime, we could get specie as well as goods upon credit, and Europe supposing her securities good, made no demand on us for specie in return for interest or principle. Heavy loans negotiated abroad, were taken up in specie to a large amount, and of course the gold and silver flowed into the nation. But where "Libertas" got his specie table