Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, the President of the Board of Trade,
made an interesting speech at the annual dinner of the Bristol Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday. He said that in spite of the impending Dissolution, the members of the House of Commons, like "the little victims " in Gray's ode to Eton College, played "regardless of their doom," showing as inordinate an appetite for information as ever by the number of their questions, and apparently a perfect incredulity as to their fate in the vast number of legislative proposals which they bring in, and which, in case of an early Dissolution, they can of course never even hope to pass. On commercial prospects he was not very hopeful. He did not ascribe any very great part of the de- pression to the M'Kinley and other protective tariffs, though they had no doubt exerted an influence in slightly diminishing our export trade. He inclined to credit the Baring crisis with the largest share of the mischief, for it had shaken that confidence which is of the very life of commerce ; and he intimated a doubt whether the shock of failure itself might not have been of shorter duration, though it would have been sharper while it lasted, than the apprehension produced by the measures taken for bolstering-up the endangered house. He thought the dwindling export trade was less due to the shutting up of markets than to the fear of our merchants that if they sent the goods, the goods would not be paid for when delivered. But would not a gigantic Baring failure have produced that impression even more powerfully?
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