Many of the authorities which I have already adduced, or to which I have referred, may convey a competent notion of some of our principal manufactures.  Their general state will be clear from that of our external and internal commerce, through which they circulate, and of which they are at once the cause and effect.  But the communication of the several parts of the kingdom with each other and with foreign countries has always been regarded as one of the most certain tests to evince the prosperous or adverse state of our trade in all its branches.  Recourse has usually been had to the revenue of the Post-Office with this view.  I shall include the product of the tax which was laid in the last war, and which will make the evidence more conclusive, if it shall afford the same inference:  I allude to the Post-Horse duty, which shows the personal intercourse within the kingdom, as the Post-Office shows the intercourse by letters both within and without.  The first of these standards, then, exhibits an increase, according to my former schemes of comparison, from an eleventh to a twentieth part of the whole duty.[50] The Post-Office gives still less consolation to those who are miserable in proportion as the country feels no misery.  From the commencement of the war to the month of April, 1796, the gross produce had increased by nearly one sixth of the whole sum which the state now derives from that fund.  I find that the year ending 5th of April, 1793, gave 627,592_l._, and the year ending at the same quarter in 1796, 750,637_l._, after a fair deduction having been made for the alteration (which, you know, on grounds of policy I never approved) in your privilege of franking.  I have seen no formal document subsequent to that period, but I have been credibly informed there is very good ground to believe that the revenue of the Post-Office[51] still continues to be regularly and largely upon the rise.

What is the true inference to be drawn from the annual number of bankruptcies has been the occasion of much dispute.  On one side it has been confidently urged as a sure symptom of a decaying trade:  on the other side it has been insisted that it is a circumstance attendant upon a thriving trade; for that the greater is the whole quantity of trade, the greater of course must be the positive number of failures, while the aggregate success is still in the same proportion.  In truth, the increase of the number may arise from either of those causes.  But all must agree in one conclusion,—­that, if the number diminishes, and at the same time every other sort of evidence tends to show an augmentation of trade, there can be no better indication.  We have already had very ample means of gathering that the year 1796 was a very favorable year of trade, and in that year the number of bankruptcies was at least one fifth below the usual average.  I take this from the declaration of the Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords.[52] He professed to speak from the records of Chancery; and he added another very striking fact,—­that on the property actually paid into his court (a very small part, indeed, of the whole property of the kingdom) there had accrued in that year a net surplus of eight hundred thousand pounds, which was so much new capital.