ment; and we conceive that a small military garrison will be suffi cient for the protection of the two islands, whose security appears to us to depend rather on a naval than a military force.

It is the Cape which must be considered as the great military depôt; and the Isle of France, with its commodious harbour, ast the general naval establishment for repairing and refitting the squadron employed on the Cape station. The military works for the protection of Port Louis being all that are necessary to be kept up, and being already, as we understand, complete, the talents of an engineer cannot be required, and the expenditure of that department, which seldom knows any bounds, may be altogether spared.

But, for other reasons than that of expense, it may be politic neither to extend, nor indeed to keep in repair, the military works on the island. When the great question of peace comes to be agitated, if such an event can be looked to during the life of the present ruler of France, we may be assured that the restoration of the two islands will be made a sine qua non. This consideration will undoubtedly have its due effect on the minds of those who may have to negotiate, and they will not, we are well assured, fail to exact an equivalent in some other quarter in which our interests and our wishes are equally concerned, for a sacrifice to which the enemy attaches so decided an importance.

Looking forward to such an event, we should be inclined to say, pull down rather than build up; demolish rather than repair; encourage agriculture and commerce, and contribute by every possible means to the comfort and prosperity of the inhabitants; but repress the expenditure of British capital on the permanent property of the islands, and, above all, on military works, which may one day be turned against us.

The Cape of Good Hope is the colony on which British capital may be laid out to individual and national advantage. Why this delightful region has been so totally neglected since it came into our possession; why a tract of country equal to the immediate subsistence of ten thousand families, and eventually to ten times that number, is suffered to remain a waste, is a mystery in political economy which we do not pretend to unravel. This grand outwork of India cannot by any possibility be ceded at a peace. To whom indeed should it be ceded? Obtained by conquest from a power that no longer exists, whose very name is blotted out of the map of Europe, we should as soon yield up one of our ports as listen to a proposal for surrendering this important colony. Here unquestionably should be established our great military depôt, where the climate is favourable for the soldier, and where his subsistence can be afforded at a cheaper rate than in any other part of the world.

We have stated that the Isle of France was considered as highly

important for the commerce, &c. of the enemy. It was, in fact, the only source from which he could draw a small supply of colonial produce. To his marine it was of more consequence than would at first appear. It was the only place to which his frigates could run. The safe return of any one of them was a great feat; an escape was hailed as a triumph; the officers and crews, now become sailors, were distributed among their line-of-battle ships, to instruct the amphibious and sea-sick officers and landmen, who had been so long pent up in port. By the capture of the islands we have cut off this little nursery for training sea officers, and narrowed the means of raising seamen. Napoleon may build ships' till his ports and harbours are choaked with them; he must have colonies and commerce' before they will be of much use to him; they are machines that will neither fight nor sail of their own accord, nor can they ever be fought or moved by landmien. Our obvious policy, therefore, is to prevent him, which we can easily do, from making seamen.

The Isle of France was the spot in which was hatched and nurtured the spirit of disaffection and revolt among the Mahrattas and other powers of Hindostan. It furnished a ready and never-failing supply of adventurers in search of military fortune. It supplied arms and ammunition, and officers to teach the use of them, to the disaffected in Persia, through those ready instruments, the commercial agents, stationed at Muscat and Bussorah. All assistance and co-operation from this quarter with any of the powers of India is completely cut off; and so commanding is our situation in those seas, that were we, by any unforeseen event, compelled to abandon the peninsula of India, we verily believe that no power on earth would hold it to any advantage, or in any state of tranquillity, while the Cape of Good Hope, the Mauritius, and Ceylon remained in our possession. This last magnificent island, possessing harbours in which the whole navy of England might lie in perfect security, might become, by proper culture, the granary of the Indian empire. To England it should be considered as the brightest jewel in the Indian diadem. it is the spot on which, in case of misfortune, our army will find a safe retreat, and from which alone we could hope to regain a footing on the continent. In short, it is the key of India. Here should be our grand establishment. Our empire is insular; and while we confine ourselves to islands we are secure.

Having thus concisely pointed out the several views under which the conquest of the French Islands may be regarded, we have only farther to observe, that no event of equal importance to the state of the war, has, in our opinion, taken place, since the memorable and unparalleled victory of Trafalgar.

ART. XI. Chalmers,-Hill,-Bosanquet,-Ricardo,-Atkinson, -E. Thornton, Rutherford, Lyne, Cock,-Coutts Trotter,--Fonblanque, Eliot,-Smith,-Wilson,-Hoare, ---Maryatt-on the Report of the Bullion Committee.

INCE the publication of the Report of the Bullion Committee, the pamphlets on that subject have been innumerable, but we profess to have found our intellects confused, rather than assisted by these successive attempts to throw new light upon the question.

Most of them are on one side. The Bullion Committee, (with which Mr. Huskisson is considered as identified,) is the common enemy, and is attacked from the right and from the left, in the front and in the rear, by a numerous musquetry and by a few light field pieces, but not, so far as we have yet observed, by any artillery of a large calibre. The adversaries indeed do not act much in concert, and hence it occasionally happens, that they pour in their fire upon each other.

It is not our design to review fully any of the works before us, or to touch on all the various parts of this extensive question. Our object is to give the character of several of these publications, to enlarge on a few leading points, and to expose some fundamental and very dangerous errors.

One of the most ponderous of the pieces of ordnance employed on this occasion against the Committee is directed by Mr. CHALMERS, but being somewhat of the mortar kind, it is not pointed with precision, and never hits the citadel. His shells however hiss through the air, and burst in ten thousand strange and most unexpected directions. In plainer words Mr. Chalmers begins in anger, and maintains his rage through his whole 237 pages. He is disposed to quarrel with almost every sentence in the Report. He tells us of a society formed in Paris for the purpose of depriving us of our specie; he sees nothing but the spirit of innovation and jacobinism in the exhortations to return to the ancient and unabrogated law, and to the accustomed standard of our currency. He shews by dint of document after document, that our commerce is prodigiously and progressively increasing, and that we are a nation thriving beyond all example; he treats a little of the balance of trade to which he refers the state of our exchanges, and affirms in language to which we shall hereafter advert, that the Committee are mistaken in supposing that bullion is the foundation of our money sys

tem.

Mr. HILL, on the other hand, begins calmly, but gathers warmth as he proceeds, and is for the most part, as we think, satisfactorily answered by his own statements and admissions. He commences by describing three situations through which a commercial country

may be supposed to pass, the stationary, the improving, and the declining, and it is remarkable that he dates our declining state in respect to trade, and in respect to exchanges, as the necessary result from the æra of the suspension of the cash payment of the Bank of England. He differs altogether from the Bullion Committee.You will perceive,' he says, that I attribute the evils so loudly complained of (the rise of the price of bullion and great depression of exchanges) solely and exclusively to the absolute scarcity of specie and bullion in this country; and that so far from considering this scarcity as the result of an excessive issue of paper, 1 consider that that issue is the only circumstance which has prevented the scarcity of precious metals from being more severely felt.' (p. 41.) That there are cases,' however, in which a circulating medium not convertible into specie may become excessive, and by excess may occasion a rise in the nominal price of commodities,' he does not as an abstract position take upon him to deny.' We feel curious to know what are those excepted cases in which a nominally high price of commodities may be referred to an excess of paper, and we also should have been gratified if he had enabled us to discover what is the meaning of those words so often used in the course of the present controversy, both by this writer and others, that the doctrine of the Bullion Committee as an abstract position' is not to be denied. The concession is apparently very flattering to that body, and proceeds from a quarter little disposed to compliment them. We are therefore anxious to understand what are the means, by which the wisdom of the doctrine of these visionary men is to be reconciled with the folly of adopting it.

But we have a much stronger admission in the sequel. Mr. Hill having dismissed the price of bullion, is occupied about the balance of trade, and is eager now to shew that a reduction of paper will not improve, nor in any respect alter that balance, a position in which, after some little qualification of it, we should agree. But in order to enforce this wholesome truth, he finds it necessary to assert, and he accordingly does assert most explicitly and unreservedly, that doctrine which he had before but half conceded, by denominating it an abstract position, and which for all present practical purposes he had in the outset of his book most manfully denied. In illustration of his new position, that a diminution of paper will not improve the balance of trade, he puts the supposed case of the ' reduction of the circulating medium to exactly one half of its present amount.' He shews, first, how such a reduction would operate on our internal affairs, namely, by reducing all prices, and then how inoperative it would be in respect to foreign commercial transactions, since these are purely of the nature of barter. It would produce, he plainly says, a proportionate reduction in the

nominal price of every species of property. Land, buildings, shipping, merchandise, labour, and every other species of saleable commodities would be reduced in value one half. Indeed! Would a reduction of paper produce this effect on the price of every spe cies of saleable commodities? We beg leave then to remind Mr. Hill that among saleable commodities,' bullion is unquestionably one. If a reduction in the value of paper would lower the value, in exchange for paper, of manufactures of every kind-of hardware, of broad-cloth, and cotton goods-and of all the produce of the soilof corn, of fruits, and of wines, we presume that it would also lower the value, in exchange for paper, of all the produce of the mines-of iron, of brass, of copper, of silver, and of gold. Thus, according to Mr. Hill's own shewing, a reduction of paper would lower the price of gold. It would produce,' he says, a proportionate reduction.If therefore bullion should at any time be 20 per cent. higher than paper, (as in fact it now is,) or if 50 per cent, the case put by Mr. Hill, a proportionate diminution of paper would not fail to equalize their value.

Mr. Hill begins to perceive this consequence of his position as he closes his sentence, for he adds, that at first sight it might appear that this is the most desirable effect which could be produced, as it would enable us to return to the original and salutary principle of a circulating medium always convertible into cash.' Assuredly it would. The diminution of paper would make the value of paper rise in proportion to that of bullion. It could not fail, if carried sufficiently far, to cause the tide of bullion to flow into the country instead of flowing out of it, and thus to facilitate the opening of the Bank of England. This result is very plain and obvious. Mr. Hill does not stop to controvert it, but proceeds very contentedly in his inquiry, regardless of the fact, which he appears to have suspected for a moment, that by this admission, he had altogether overturned the fundamental principle of his work. He takes leave of the subject, by remarking, that this reduction,' however, of our paper, which would so evidently,' as he again says, 'reduce the price of every other kind of property (bullion of course included), would only have the effect'(we complain here most grievously of the ambiguous use of the word only) of raising money proprietors to twice their present height in society. It would only have this effect! It would also, he himself admits, enable us to resume our cash payments. But we are not, it seems, to revert to the ancient standard, because the restoration of that standard would disturb that new order of things which our own recent departure from it has occasioned; and one advantage of which is that it has already degraded many proprietors' 20 per cent. below their legitimate height in society Mr. Hill allows, that if the Bank Directors are compelled to re