patrimony in riotous living, and, dying in- | act, and solely with a view to their own sesolvent, left these two female wards on the curity and their own profit. parish." We suppose there can be no harm The other fallacy is that the Bank of Engnow in saying that this man was Sergeant land- that is to say the Bank of Deposit Bearcroft. The other case is hardly better. and Discount, of which the Issue DepartIt was that of a clergyman deprived of a ment is quite independent-can raise or large fortune by the villany of a trustee, who lower the rate of interest at pleasure. left him no compensation beyond the decis- This also is an error, as far at least as it ion in a civil court that the fortune undoubt-relates to the average permanent rates of inedly was his ("we tried it on appeal from terest, which are governed solely, like the Ireland in this House," says Lord Brougham, prices of all commodities, by the laws of "on a somewhat remarkable day, the morn- supply and demand-the proportion of ing after the Reform Bill was rejected")-buyers to sellers, and borrowers to lenders. the fruits of the crime having already been This fallacy, however, would not have takremoved beyond the civil judge's jurisdiction. en deep possession of the public mind if it We have seen how narrow was the race did not contain some element of truth. between criminal and civil procedure in the case of the banker thieves-and how easily the shelter of laws for defence of commercial credit is convertible into an Alsatia for protection of commercial robbers. But the public is keenly alive to the whole question just at present, and Lord Brougham has well chosen his time to point attention to a scandal which is but a part of the same defective branch of the English criminal law. The Law Amendment Society have promptly taken it up, and in the success of their agitation in this matter, as in so many others, all honest men are directly interested. THE BANK OF ENGLAND. To the Editor of the Economist (27 Oct.): One of them is the notion that the Act of 1844 imposed on the Committee of the Bank Parlor the duty of watching the exchanges, and of adopting such measures as they might deem expedient for checking a rapid drain of gold. The readers of the ECONOMIST need hardly to be told that this is an error; but, for the information of others, the fact requires sometimes to be restated. Mercantile men see clearly enough that, however little the Bank of England can affect average permanent values, its operations have an immediate and powerful effect on the rates and prices which prevail at the moment; so much so that at times, if the fate of the nation depended on the decisions of the Bank Parlor, they could not be watched for with more intense anxiety. To account for this we should observe that the demand for capital is of two kinds :that which is governed by consumption, and that which arises from apprehension. If there were never any other demand for capital than that which is governed by consumption, or the ultimate need of capital, we should never see any sudden changes in the rate of interest from one extreme rate to another. A rise or fall in the rate of interest would always be gradual, because consumption, even in a time of war, is always a gradual process. It is otherwise with a demand arising out. of apprehension; to the rapid and extreme fluctuations of which, between a state of confidence and one of fear, especially as affecting money capital, it is hardly possible to assign a limit. When confidence is felt, a very small amount of notes or coin suffices for the daily transactions of business. Money circulates freely, because paid away as fast as it is received. Where distrust is excited, or an exWhat is now called the Bank of Issue is pectation of coming difficulties, payments are practically a department of Government, deferred. Every one seeks to increase his issuing notes only in exchange for gold, and reserves. Even a small tradesman will keep on the security of £14,000,000 of its own by him the hundred pounds he could otherstock; and, how, in an extreme case, gold wise spare; and assuming that in commeris to be found for these £14,000,000 of notes, cial Europe there are a million of persons in practically inconvertible, is an affair for the a not less anxious position, this alone repreconsideration of a Cabinet Council, not for sents a demand for £100,000,000 sterling that of the Governors and Company of the more than would be required if no apprehenBank of England. An efflux of gold, like a sion existed. rise in the price of corn, is to the Committee No wonder, then, that in such circumstanof the Bank Parlor only one of the indica- ces we should see the rate of interest suddentions that capital is becoming scarce; upon ly doubled, and six per cent. become a miniwhich they act as other commercial bodies mum of discount where the experience of a long series of years had shown that it could 1. Without denying or affirming the pro not be permanently maintained as high as four. priety of issuing fourteen millions of paper on other than metallic securities, is it wise or expedient to give the use of them to a single body? But if the principle be correct that all rapid and extreme variations are occasioned, not by consumption, but by apprehension, 2. Is it possible thus to foster the existence it becomes a subject for very grave inquiry of a gigantic and irresponsible interest withwhether the action of the Bank of England out placing, at critical periods, the whole is not directly concerned in those we are now industry and prosperity of the community at witnessing. its mercy? The Bank of England differs from other banks of deposit and discount in being allowed a monopoly use of the £14,000,000 of notes issued only on Government securities-an exclusive privilege to which there can be no adequate counterpoise in private competition. The leviathan influence thus erected, on whichever side it may incline in the scale of commercial values, must always produce violent oscillations. Monetary panics have lately been of frequent recurrence; but the history of all of them (those only excepted brought about by political revolutions) is nearly the same. There is first a slightly perceptible growing demand for money, which excites but little attention until notice has been given that the Bank have raised their rate of discount. This, by the uneasiness it occasions, increases the demand; upon which the Bank, when ill-advised, raises the rate again. The second advance, following soon after the first, and rumors of a third in contemplation, operate as an alarm-gun at sea; every vessel in Iler Majesty's fleet reefs topsails and prepares for a storm. With a third advance the next week or fortnight, rumors of a fourth, and the appearance of the Bank broker as a large seller of Government stock, panic begins. Very mistaken is the notion that the Bank of England, by discounting largely at a time of pressure, although at a usurious rate, affords any relief to the public. It would do so, of course, if its capital were in hand; but when money is cheap that capital is invested in Consols and Exchequer bills, and these must be sold to procure the notes required for additional discount accommodation. Consols and Exchequer bills are a barometer for all the stocks of Europe; and to force them upon the market at an unfavorable moment, for the sake of discounting, is to kindle a conflagration with one hand, and seek to extinguish it with the other. The object of this letter is to invite you to discuss the remedy for such an evil. The subject is one quite distinct from that of the basis of our currency; which, with £11,000,000 of gold in the Department of Issue, is at least in no immediate danger. These are the questions I wish to see answered: 3. Have there been no instances of the Bank, looking only to its dividends, acting against the Government, in the very crisis of a public loan? In a word, would not the country be safer than at present from mischievous vicissitudes in the value of every description of property, and periodical monetary convulsions, if free trade in corn were followed by free trade in banking, and Government interference with the circulating medium were confined to the protection of the coins which form our standard of value?—I am your obedient servant, W. E. HICKSON. FAIRSEAT, WROTHAM, KENT, Oct. 18, 1855. P. S.-The Bank returns published since the above was written confirm the fact that the drain of gold, upon which the attention of the public has been too exclusively fixed, is a mere coincidence of the existing monetary derangement, and not its cause. The correct and well-understood principle of banking management is to keep in hand a reserve of cash equal to one-third the amount of outstanding liabilities. The Issue Department would, therefore, have been safe if, on the 13th of October, with a circulation of £25,205,855, its bullion had amounted to only £8,400,000, instead of which it was £11,205,855. Very different, however, is the case of the other department, governed, not by any fixed rules, but by the capricious policy of the Bank Parlor. Its reserve, instead of being three millions in excess, was (and at dividend time) nearly a million deficient,£5,104,056, against claims to the amount of £17,239,643. The crisis has been brought about by the old fault of the Banking Department, overtrading. It first, to procure business, discounts bills to any extent applied for below the market rate, and then, suddenly, when it finds it has gone beyond its strength, makes a convulsive effort to sustain its own credit. Seven per cent. discount means only that the Bank lends no more money till it has got money to lend, and for which it must wait the maturity of the bills it discounted at 3 1-2 and 4 per cent. As these fall due, every one may see without mystifying him self with the exchanges, that notes and gold will flow in; and, when they have done so, the Bank will again lower its rate of discount, as it did in December, 1847, to get back its trade. The popular theory now is, that if the Committee of the Bank Parlor were allowed to place their hands on the gold of the Issue Department nothing of this kind would happen; but it is obviously just as easy to overtrade with a capital of £30,000,000 as with one of £20,000,000. DENCE IN ENGLAND. in people of England; her oppressor stood elated with success on the neck of the victim, proud in the menacing attitude of the restored power of despotism, yet I found the curse of execration pouring down on his name from four millions of British lips. The conscience of the British people sat in judgment on the morality of kings. Was it I who lured England into those prayers, into that curse? I The flowers of sympathy that grew up my path from Southampton to Winchester, and along the streets of LonThe remedy must be sought, not in sur-don, across the halls of the Mansion House rendering the securities we have obtained for and up to the mighty gatherings of hunconvertibility by the Act of 1844, but in the dreds of thousands of free Britons at Birabolition or restriction of all exclusive bank-mingham and Manchester-the flowers of ing privileges. The Banking Department sympathy that were conveyed to me by admust either be placed on the footing of a dresses and delegations from more than a private bank, or restrained from making the hundred localities where I never happened to same free use as at present of the Govern-be-were they the work of my words? I ment deposits. have England for witness that they were not. They were a spontaneous offering of the KOSSUTH ON HIS RECEPTION AND RESI- moral sense of the English people at the shrine of justice and right. My task has been to gather the free offerings, and to THE Briton with the soul of ancient times, thank for the noble gift in the name of my the words of whom I quote; he, who so well country as well as I could in the broken can imagine how the Brutuses may have accents of a language foreign to me; and felt, and how a Demosthenes spoke, he remem- staggering as I was under the weight of honbered the 6th of October. [M. Kossuthors paid to me, sympathy for my country, refers to Mr. Landor.] I claim from him and not my own desert, caused to reflect on the honor of being allowed to offer to him my own humble self. On my return from herewith the public homage of my heartfelt America, I secluded myself in the solitude gratitude. May the best blessings of Heaven of undying grief, and of undesponding hope, with him! Amongst millions of free justified by the imperishable vitality of my Britons he alone remembered publicly the country, to which I trust, like as the martyrs day on which Francis Joseph of Austria of old trusted to their God, for the ultimate then yet a boy in years, but more than a triumph of their faith. It was on that vitalNero in cruelty-revelled with fiendish fero-ity, on the justice of the Eternal, and on the city in the blood of the bravest and the best inexorable logic of events, that I rested my of my country, and gloated upon the agony hopes, and not on foreign sympathy. This of a heroic nation. It was a deed, rarely did not court. I rather went out of the equalled in baseness, never surpassed.. way of it. Nobody can charge me of obtruTwo years after the bloody day of Arad, I sively parading my grief. It was of too first landed on the shores of England, a sacred a character to be thus profaned. homeless wanderer, powerless and poor; and For nearly two years I lived a hermit, lonely I saw my landing become the signal for a and mute in this gigantic hive of busy miluniversal outburst of sympathy with my lions-to me a desert. At last came the country's wrongs, such as no people ever war, and with the war the consummation of experienced from a foreign nation. Hun- my prophetic words, that the fault of havgary, a couple of years before scarcely known ing permitted the ambition of Russia to intername, I found a household word at every fere with the destinies of Hungary would British hearth; she lay prostrate under the fall back on the head of England with countiron hoof of foreign oppression, yet her less sacrifices in treasures and blood. name had a share in the prayers of the suth in the Atlas. I Kos 1 THE LIVING AGE AND CHARLES LAMB. | wrote, - "Suum Cuique." Having resolutely shunned the demon of collectorship (I once had Galileo's signature), I bestowed this volume on the Rev. Mr. Cuyler, of this city. * SCOTTISH FOLK LORE.-I wish to make a note of the following bits of "folk lore," still current in this district, and that have come unasked before me, and will be heard. That they are religiously believed in, admits of no manner of doubt. Salt. I offered to help an old Highland lady at dinner one day to some salt from the "cellar," which stood much nearer to me than to her; she gravely put back my hand, and drew away her plate, saying at the same time, with a kind of shudder, between her teeth: "Help me to saut! Help me to sorrow!" - NEW YORK, 22 November, 1855. MY DEAR MR. LITTELL:-I dare say you will remember the name at the other end, as that of one whom you once knew a little. It is not common to thank editors, but I write to thank you for the great pleasure which the Living Age brings to me every week-a pleasure which, doubtless, I share with many others. For the most part, your selections are just what my palate craves; or peradventure the palate has been trained to your bill of fare. Anyhow, it suits me hugely. My dear sir, you and I are now between fifty and a hundred, and remember several old Philadelphia items which the younger fry cannot comprehend. Day before yesterday, the only French Quaker I ever knew was buried good Stephen Grellet, of Burlington. He figures delightfully in J. J. Gurney's Life. He used to preach in meeting, pronouncing the English words exactly as if they had been French. I was the other day looking over the Sneezing. It is a thing known, and fixed volumes of the Museum, which I took at its as the eternal fates in the minds of all douce beginning in 1822. There it was I first laid nurses, and especially all "howdies" whatsoeyes on Elia; and I shall never cease to admire ever, that a new-born child is in the fairy and cherish myself for having tasted the savor spells until it sneezes; then all danger is past. of them, and devoured them over and over, I once overheard an old and most reverendlong before I ever heard the name of Charles looking dame, of great experience in howdieLamb. Apropos de quoi - when I was in Lon- craft, crooning over a new-born child; and then don, I went to Leadenhall street, to the India watching it intently, and in silence, for nearly House, in order to seek out some memorials of a minute, she said, taking a huge pinch of Lamb. A doorkeeper, in a cocked hat, said: snuff, "Och! oich! No yet-no yet." Sud"I have been here since I was sixteen years old, denly the youngster exploded in a startling but I never heard of any Mr. Lamb." Such is manner into a tremendous sneeze; when the old fame! A prophet is not without honor, &c. lady suddenly bent down, and, as far as I could But the doorkeeper of the Museum remembered see, drew her forefinger across the brows of the him well-"O yes, he was a very little man, child, very much as if making the sign of the with such small legs, and wore knee-breeches." cross (although, as a strict Calvinist, she would He directed me to some private stairs, which have been scandalized at the idea), and joyfully would take me down to the "Accounts." This exclaimed, "God sain the bairn, it's no a warwas a place like a bank, where I was shown to a lock!" Even people of education I have heard principal person, a Mr. Waghorn or Wagstaff. say, and maintain stoutly, that no idiot ever This was the room in which Lamb sat to write sneezed or could sneeze!-Notes and Queries. for many years; but it had been altered. I saw his window, however, and the dead wall beyond, mentioned in the "Old India House." Mr. W. regretted that the folio ledgers, &c., had been removed. He showed me a quarto volume of Interest Tables, with such remarks as these on the fly-leaf, in Lamb's round, clerkly hand, but not with the "three inks": "A book of much interest."— Edinburgh Review. "A work in which the interest never flags." Quarterly Review. "We may say of this volume, that the interest increases from the beginning to the end.". Monthly Review. VERSES TO HOGARTH'S PICTURES.- Did Hogarth employ a penny-a-liner of the day to write the verses which, à la Callot, were suffixed to his plates? or were the illustrative verses the additions of a subsequent publisher? Who wrote the verses to "The Harlot's Progress??? C. MANSFIELD INGLEBY. BIRMINGHAM. [In Hogarth's Works, by Nichols and Steevens, vol. II., p. 104, it is stated that "the verses to The Harlot's Progress' made their first appearance under the earliest and best of the pirated copies published by Bowles. Hogarth, A few years ago I came into possession of the finding that such a metrical description had its identical copy of "Vinny Bourne's" Latin poems, effect, resolved that his next series of prints alluded to by Lamb. It contains an autograph should receive the same advantage from an by him of the only Latin epigram he ever |abler hand."]-Notes and Queries. LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 608.-19 JANUARY, 1856. plaining of lawyers oppressing you; whereas it is dull and respectable men who are the unconscious bullies of the world. Milverton. It is as some safeguard against this most oppressive and pervading tyranny of the unwritten law that I have ever thought eccentric persons a great blessing to mankind. But for them, we should all be crushed down into a semi-fluid state of utter respectability, entire conformity, and superabundant folly. They are the centrifugal forces in life-they are the salt of the earth. Better to have them, even when they border upon madness, than not to have them at all. Mr. Midhurst. As if life were not miserable enough what with smoking chimneys, screaming children, wrangling and jangling marriages, tiresome friendships, oppressive relationships, nothing being what it seems to be, nothing made to suit, but everything to sell-bad workmanship through- Observe in such a trifling thing as dress. out, from a house in Belgravia to a penny how hard it is to gain the least improvement. roll, the Court of Chancery here, and a The Broad-grin Interest aided by little boys, prospect, alas! for many of us of a worse The Respectable Interest, the Sublime place hereafter; -as if, I say, life were not Canting Interest, is always against the immiserable enough without this nuisance and prover. Columbus has to be giggled at by burden of passports. I have waited for a inane cosmographers, and to endure that for long time, watching dynasty rise upon dynasty, years. Shall not the man who proposes a hailing revolution after revolution, only in rational hat have his troubles also to endure, the hopes of getting rid of this transcendent or the woman who endeavors, in a sloppy absurdity. And here it is as strong as ever. country, to abridge a stupid petticoat, have The government that does do away with it her sorrows? will have one sincere supporter Ellesmere. More than many governments can boast of, my dear sir ; but pray don't let me interrupt you. Midhurst. in me, sir. One sincere supporter for life Milverton. These minor nuisances, Mr. Midhurst, at least have the advantage of making you forget some of the major ones in your catalogue, which you have left at home. Midhurst. I don't know that, sir: the capacity for human suffering is very elastic. Ellesmere. Especially to be pelted by small Conservatives. Milverton. The love of foolish comment on one side, and the fear of it on the other, stifle many of the wisest improvements. A great humorist, a friend of mine, who lives in all kinds of society, from the highest to the lowest, came home from abroad with a resplendent beard. Being a courageous man he resolved to face the world with it; but his main reason for maintaining this interesting appendage was, as he said, to ascertain how many of his acquaintance were gentlemen ; that is, how many of them would make no remark about his change of appearance. He says he expected to find nine; but all human expectations go far beyond the mark. He only found six, the Duke of S, Mr. Ellesmere. Ay, and what is worse, there B the great banker and capitalist, a is the unwritten law, by which human beings, driver of an omnibus, an accomplished writer especially in a country with free institutions, of comedies, a confirmed lunatic-who, howcontrive to vex one another more even than ever, had once been a remarkable gentleman, by all the statutes, laws, and ordinances that and myself. I was very proud, as you ever were penned. You are always com- may imagine, at finding myself in such good DCVIII. LIVING AGE. VOL. XII. 9 Milverton. Surely your experience of the world, Mr. Midhurst, must have shown you that the moment people have met together in any number-say even twenty they begin to think how they shall annoy each other by all manner of trifling rules and regulations. |