On Financial Reform

Prior to its publication in 1830, the draft of this work by Sir Henry Parnell, later Baron Congleton (1776-1842), was praised by John Stuart Mill, who said he could ‘not see that it is possible to lay down the principles of political economy more broadly’. Chair of the select committee on public income and expenditure during the Duke of Wellington’s first ministry, Parnell called for greater retrenchment and reduced taxation. He also argues here that ‘the passage of merchandise from one state to another … ought to be as free as air and water’, denouncing the supporters of protection as ‘among the greatest enemies of mankind’. A later pamphlet by Parnell, A Plain Statement of the Power of the Bank of England (1832), highly critical of the Bank’s monopoly, is included in this reissue. His Treatise on Roads (1833) is reissued separately in the Cambridge Library Collection.