discounted. During the whole time they remain out, they perform all the functions of circulating medium; and, before they come to be paid in discharge of those bills, they have already been followed by a new issue of notes in a similar operation of discounting. Each successive advance repeats the same process. If the whole sum of discount continue outstanding at a given amount, there will remain permanently out in circulation a corresponding amount of paper; and, if the amount of discounts is progressively increasing, the amount of paper which remains out in circulation over and above what is otherwise wanted for the occasions of the public will progressively increase also, and the money prices of commodities will progressively rise. This progress may be as indefinite as the range of speculation and adventure in a great commercial country."

As the Bank, in making its loans, pays out its notes instead of capital, these, if they represent capital, will as a rule be discharged only by its consumption. That they are outstanding, is evidence that the merchandise they represent is not consumed. They have, therefore, until taken in by the Bank, the same value, by virtue of representing the same merchandise, no matter into whose hands they may fall. It is their possession which entitles their holder to the merchandise they represent. That they change their character before their retirement being capital in the hands of the party to whom they were first issued, and currency, representing no capital, in the hands of all subsequent holders is an assumption which is exactly opposed to the fact. They are never discharged of their value till they come back to the party issuing them. Whatever are issued, equally fall into the channel of circulation, and alike return to the Bank for retirement; so that, unless they were reissued, there would presently be no currency outstanding. Just in ratio that the bills of a Bank are paid are its liabilities taken in. They will be paid in equally after as before suspension by the Bank. If, at a particular moment, currency, which was capital in the hands of one person ceased to be capital in the hands of another, without any change in its form, or in that which it represented, certainly the Committee should have shown, or have attempted to show, the process by which, and the time at which the change in value was effected. A moment's reflection would have shown that no such change could have taken place; but such is not the way with the Economists. Not one of them ever broke through the crust of words and assumptions by means of which the

real principles of currency have been concealed from sight. How the fictions they uttered could have been accepted as sober truths by Horner, Thornton, and Huskisson exceeds belief. It is infinitely more incredible than that those of the Alchemists should have been accepted in a credulous and unscientific age. The transmutation of lead, tin, and quicksilver into gold was a proposition ten times more credible than the transmutation of a bank-note from something into nothing. That such fables could really have been accepted as fundamental truths by the wisest, most discreet, and most earnest of our race, is mortifying evidence of our weakness, and shows how little confidence we are entitled to place even in our strongest convictions.

"We must not omit," continues the Committee, "to state one very important principle: that mere numerical return of the amount of bank-notes out in circulation cannot be considered as at all deciding the question whether such paper is or is not excessive. It is necessary to have recourse to other tests. The same amount of paper may, at one time, be less than enough, and, at another time, more. The quantity of currency required will vary in some degree with the extent of trade; and the increase of our trade, which has taken place since the suspension, must have occasioned some increase in the quantity of our currency. But the quantity of currency has no fixed proportion to the quantity of commodities; and any inferences proceeding upon such a supposition would be entirely erroneous. The effective currency of a country depends upon the quickness of circulation, and the number of exchanges performed in a given time, as well as upon its numerical amount; and all the circumstances which have a tendency to quicken or to retard the rate of circulation render the same amount of currency more or less adequate to the wants of trade. A much smaller amount is required in a high state of public credit than when alarms make individuals call in their advances and provide against accidents by hoarding, and in a period of commercial security and private confidence, than when mutual distrust discourages pecuniary arrangements for any distant time. But, above all, the same amount of currency will be more or less adequate, in proportion to the skill which the great money-dealers possess in managing and economizing the use of the circulating medium. Your Committee are of opinion, that the improvements which have taken place of late years in this country, and particularly in the district of London, with regard to the use and economy of money among bankers, and in the mode of adjusting commercial payments, must have had a much greater effect than has hitherto been ascribed to them, in rendering the same sum adequate to a much greater amount of trade and payments than formerly. Some of those improvements will be found detailed in the evidence. They consist principally in the in

creased use of banker's drafts in the common payments of London; the contrivance of bringing all such drafts daily to a common receptacle, where they are balanced against each other; and the intermediate agency of bill-brokers. And several other changes in the practice of London bankers are to the same effect, of rendering it unnecessary for them to keep so large a deposit of money as formerly. Within the London district, it would certainly appear that a smaller sum of money is required than formerly, to perform the same number of exchanges and amount of payments, if the rate of prices had remained the same. It is material also to observe, that both the policy of the Bank of England itself, and the competition of the country Bank paper, have tended to compress the paper of the Bank of England more and more within London and the adjacent districts. All these circumstances must have co-operated to render a smaller augmentation of Bank of England paper necessary to supply the demands of our increased trade, than might otherwise have been required; and show how impossible it is, from the numerical amount alone of that paper, to pronounce whether it is excessive or not. A more sure criterion must be resorted to; and such a criterion, your Committee have already shown, is only to be found in the state of the exchanges and the price of gold bullion.

"Upon a review of all the facts and reasonings which have been submitted to the consideration of your Committee in the course of their inquiry, they have formed an opinion, which they submit to the House: That there is, at present, an excess in the paper circulation of this country, of which the most unequivocal symptom is the very high price of bullion, and, next to that, the low state of the Continental exchanges; that this excess is to be ascribed to the want of a sufficient check and control in the issues of the paper from the Bank of England, and, originally, to the suspension of cash payments, which removed the natural and true control. For, upon a general view of the subject, your Committee are of opinion, that no safe, certain, and constantly adequate provision against an excess of paper currency, either occasional or permanent, can be found, except in the convertibility of all such paper into specie."

If money be capital, it must obey the laws of capital. For the movement of the latter, two parties must consent, each governed by considerations having reference to his interests. alone. Suppose one hundred hogsheads of sugar to be sold and paid for three times during the same day: no one would say that the activity of its movement had any necessary relation to its value, or that a less quantity was required by reason of such activity. Precisely the same law holds as to money. That it changes hands several times in a day does not increase or diminish its value; nor is a greater or less quantity required in consequence. If money be active, merchandise must be active. The relation of one to the other,

both in quantity and activity, must be uniform. When symbolic money is used, the title to that which it represents is transferred with the transfer of the instrument. It is only upon the supposition that money is not capital, nor the representative of capital, that the assumptions of the Committee can be sustained. If not capital, it is a scale of valuation, an instrument of commerce like a set of weights. If a community consisting of a hundred families possess only one scale or set, the whole must use it. The degree of its activity or use, in such case, measures its value. In its use, however, it is not parted with as the equivalent in value of that which it measures. So soon as it is used by one family it is passed to another, to come round again in time to the one first using it. But money, by its use, for ever passes from the hands of the party using it. He cannot hand it over to his neighbor, to perform the same service that it did for him. When properly analyzed, therefore, no more meaning can be attached to the statement, that "the effective currency of a country depends upon the quickness of circulation and the number of exchanges performed in a given time, as well as upon its numerical amount," than to a statement, that one barrel of flour, by the rapidity of its circulation, may serve the purposes of three barrels. The quantity of money must always be in ratio to the exchanges that are made. When a symbolic currency is used, the tendency of all merchandise entering into consumption is to express itself in it.

The Committee asserted that a much smaller amount of money coin and bank-notes - sufficed for the wants of the public than formerly, from the greater economy of their use; checks upon Banks and bankers having taken their place. What is the difference between checks on Banks and bankers and their notes? Nothing, whatever, but form. Neither are, in themselves, capital. Both equally represent capital. Both serve as instruments for the exchange of capital. Both equally entitle their holder to coin, and both are equally entitled to be called money. To say that fewer notes are required from the economy of their use, is the same as to say that a nation economizes in sailing vessels by the employment of steam ships. The latter tend to supersede the former, from the greater convenience of their use. To assign to the two

kinds of ships functions wholly unlike, in the transportation of merchandise, is to make distinctions where no differences whatever exist. So checks drawn upon Banks and bankers tend, for the same reason, to supersede the notes issued by them. To erect a system of finance upon a radical difference between the two kinds of currency is the very climax of folly.

The Report of the Bullion Committee was accompanied by a series of resolutions embodying the conclusions to which it finally came, and declaring that cash payments ought to be resumed by the Bank within the period of two years. Mr. Vansittart, in behalf of the government, moved a series of opposing resolutions, in which he declared that the cause of the difference in the market price of bank-notes and gold was, not that the value of notes had depreciated, but that the value of gold had risen. In his speech on the occasion, he declared that a standard such as that supposed by the Committee, consisting of a fixed and invariable weight of the precious metals, had never existed in England; that the legal coin of the country never possessed a value estimated by a fixed quantity of gold and silver bullion; that the notes of the Bank never had any other than a current value, founded on the public confidence in it; that a diminution in the value of the currency might have had the effect of improving the exchange, but could not by any possibility depress it. Mr. Horner's resolutions were defeated in the House of Commons by a very large majority; that requiring the Bank to resume within two years being rejected by a vote of 180 to 45. Upon the defeat of Mr. Horner's resolutions, those of Mr. Vansittart were taken up, and passed by a vote almost equally decisive. Nothing, of course, could be more absurd than the statements embodied in the latter resolutions. A person who should offer similar ones at the present day would be treated as a lunatic. The action of the House had no reference whatever to the merits of either. The great majority of its members were the pliant tools of the government, which had no idea of depriving itself of the means of carrying forward the vast military operations in which it was engaged.

In order to give a proper sanction to the action of the House upon Mr. Vansittart's resolution, Lord Stanhope brought in a Bill which made it a misdemeanor to make any difference in