importance. The ties of all the maritime nations are growing more and
more intimate every year, and the trouble of one is getting to be more
and more the trouble of the others in consequence; but as yet any
unsettled balance of American trade, compared with the whole trade of
those nations, is but as the drop in the bucket. John Bull, with a
productive industry of five thousand millions of dollars a year, and
Johnny Crapaud, with an industry only less, are not both to be
thrown flat on their backs by the failure of a few millions of money
remittances from Jonathan. The houses immediately engaged in the
American trade will suffer, and others again immediately dependent upon
them; but the disturbing shock, as it spreads through the widening
circle of the national trade, will very soon be dissipated and lost in
its immensity. That is, it will be lost, if trade there is itself sound,
and not tottering under the same or similar conditions of weakness
which produced the original default in this country; in which event,
we submit, our troubles are to be considered as the mere accidental
occasion of the more general downfall,--while the real cause is to be
sought in the internal state of the foreign nations. Accordingly, let
any one read the late exposures of the methods in which business is
transacted among the Glasgow banks, the London discount-houses, and the
speculators of the French Bourse, and he will see at a glance that we
Americans have no right to assume and ought not to be charged with the
entire responsibility of this stupendous syncope. Our bankruptcy has
aggravated, as our restoration will relieve the general effects; but the
vicious currency on this side the water, whatever domestic sins it
may have to answer for, cannot properly be made the scapegoat for the
offences of the other side of the water. The disasters abroad have
occurred under conditions of currency differing in many respects from
our own, and we believe that if there had been no troubles in America,
there would still have been considerable troubles in England and France,