Atlantic Monthly | Page 6

annual expense of ￡850,000.
1793. War with France,--drain of gold,--Bank contracts,--panic,--failures throughout the country,--universal hoarding,--one hundred country banks stop,--notes as low as five pounds first issued,--general fall of prices.
1796. An Order in Council suspends specie payment by the Bank.
1799. Numerous failures,--chiefly on the Continent. The pressure in England relieved by an issue of Exchequer bills.
1807-9. Great speculations in flax, hemp, silk, wool, etc.
1810. Recoil of speculation,--extensive failures, and great demand for money.
1811. Parliament adopts a resolution declaring a one-pound note and a shilling legal tender for a guinea.
1814-16. Heavy losses and bankruptcies,--failure of two hundred and forty country banks,--the distress and suffering of the people compared to that in France after the bursting of the Mississippi Scheme.
1819. Law passed for the resumption of specie payments in 1823,--after a suspension of twenty-seven years.
1822. Great commercial depression throughout Europe,--agricultural distress,--famine in Ireland.
1824. Speculations in scrips and shares of foreign loans and new companies, to a fabulous amount.
1825. Recoil of the speculations,--run upon the banks,--seventy banks stop,--a drain of gold exhausts the bullion of the Bank.
1826. Depression of trade,--government advances Exchequer bills to the Bank.
1832. A run for gold,--bullion in the Bank again alarmingly reduced.
1834-7. Jackson vs. Biddle in America produces considerable derangements in England,--drain of gold,--great alternate contractions and expansions,--severe mercantile distress.
1844. Renewal of the Bank Charter, limiting its issues,--great speculations in railroad shares, to the amount of ￡500,000,000.
1845. Recoil of the speculations,--immense sacrifice of property.
1846. Drain of gold,--large importations of corn,--alarm.
1847. Drain of gold continues,--panic and universal mercantile depression,--Bank refuses discounts,--forced sales of all kinds of property,--the Bank Charter suspended.
1857. The experiences of 1847 repeated on a more injurious scale, with another suspension of the Bank Charter Act.
Now this record does not show a brilliant success in banking; it does not encourage the hopes of those who place great hopes in a national institution; for the Bank of England is the highest result of the financial sagacity and political wisdom of the first commercial nation of the globe. A recognized ally of the government,--at the very centre of the world's trade,--enjoying a large freedom of movement within its sphere,--conducted by the most eminent merchants of the metropolis, assisted by the advice of the most accomplished political economists,--sanctioned and amended, from time to time, by the greatest ministers, from Walpole to Peel,--it has had, from its position, its power, and the talent at its command, every opportunity for doing the best things that a bank could do; and yet behold this record of periodical impotence! Its periodical mischiefs we leave out of the account.
In the United States, we have suffered from similarly recurring attacks of financial epilepsy; we have tried every expedient, and we have failed in each one; we have had three national banks; we have had thousands of chartered banks, under an infinity of regulations and restrictions against excesses and frauds; and we have had, as the appropriate commentary, three tremendous cataclysms, in which the whole continent was submerged in commercial ruin, besides a dozen lesser epochs of trying vicissitude. The history of our trade has been that of an incessant round of inflations and collapses; and the amount of rascality and fraud perpetrated in connection with the banks, in order to defeat the restrictions upon them, has no parallel but in the sponging-houses. A Belgian philosopher, from the study of statistics, has deduced a certain order in disorder,--or a law of periodicity in the recurrence of murders, suicides, crimes, and illegitimate births; and it appears that a similar regularity of irregularity might be easily detected in our cyclic bank explosions.
With the sad experiences of other nations before us,--with the rocks of danger standing high out of the water, and covered all over with the fragments of former wrecks, we have yet persisted in following the old wretched way. What a humiliating confession! what a comment on the alleged practical discernment of this practical people! what a text for radicals, socialists, and all sorts of Utopian dreamers! If the mischiefs of these monetary aberrations were confined to a mere loss of wealth,[B] which is proverbial for its winged uncertainty, we might regard them as a seeming admonition of Providence against putting too much trust in riches; but they are to be considered as something infinitely worse than mere reverses of fortune: the disorders they generate shake the very foundations of morals; and while shattering the industry, they undermine the economy and frugality and rend the integrity of mankind. We doubt whether any of the great forms of evil incident to our imperfect civilization--the slave-trade, debauchery, pauperism--cause more individual anguish or more public detriment than these incessant revolutions in the value and tenure of property. Those afflict limited classes alone, but these every class; they relax and pervert the whole moral regimen of society; and if, as it is sometimes alleged, the