The Bank of England - its origin, privileges, and profits - Mismanagement of the currency, and consequent distresses entailed upon the country - Series of panics from 1783 to 1814 - Great rise of circulation and discounts from 1800 to 1817 - Continued panics and agricultural distress in 1816, 1819, and 1822 - Return to cash payments - Effects of that measure upon prices - Mr. Matthias Attwood's speeches and theory upon the subject - The panic of 1825 and subsequent monetary revulsions.

The Bank of England owes its origin6 to a Scotchman, by name William Patterson, who proposed to relieve the embarrassments which continued to press upon the Treasury for several years after the revolution of 1688, by raising in shares, 1,200,000l.; the whole of which was to be lent to Government at 8 per cent; the lenders being incorporated as a joint stock company under the name and description of the Governor and Company of the Bank of England, with the privilege of keeping the accounts of the public debt, paying dividends, etc.; for which an allowance of 4000l. a year was to be granted to them. This proposal having been accepted, the first Bank Charter passed in 1694, under the provisions of a particular Act of Parliament - 5 & 6 William and Mary, c. 20.

6 The project of an English national Bank has been considered to have been first broached by Dr. Hugh Chamberlen, the inventor of the obstetrical forceps, whose monument, erected at the expense of Sheffield Duke of Buckingham, by Scheemakers, with a very long and very eulogistic epitaph by Bishop Atterbury, is in the north aisle of Westminster Abbey.

It is curious that, although founded by a Scotchman, Scotchmen are eschewed by the Bank. What the first of the race did to entail a ban upon his fellow countrymen is not recorded, but it is commonly said in the city that three descriptions of persons are excluded, in practice, from employment at the Bank, namely Jews, Quakers, and Scotchmen.

What a history of the Bank of England would prove as to volume and extent, if at all minutely executed, may be judged from the fact, that the bare titles of the Acts of Parliament passed upon the subject of its affairs occupy more than two hundred pages of the index to the statutes at large. Such being the case, it would be vain to attempt to do more in a book like this than having shortly set forth what the Bank was upon its first establishment, to compress into a few paragraphs a simple statement of its condition, privileges, and resources at present.

The capital of the Bank, originally 1,200,000l., is now 14,553,000l., all of which is lent to Government at the rate of about three per cent. per annum, which produces 446,302l. The dividends upon Bank stock are now, and have been since 1837, seven per cent. The existing privileges of the Bank are, the monopoly enjoyed by being constituted the only joint-stock Bank which can issue notes in London or within sixty-five miles of it1, or which can draw or accept bills of exchange upon London. Its notes, moreover, are a legal tender everywhere but at its own counter, where, upon demand, they are required to be paid in gold. The Bank receives the revenue of the country for Government, and holds the deposits of the various public offices, amounting on the average to four millions sterling. It is still remunerated for its trouble in registering transfers, and paying the dividends of the national debt; but the increase of the debt has swelled the allowance from 4000l. to 128,000l. a-year. Its charter expires in 1844, upon two conditions - one year's notice to that effect, and repayment of the debt the Government owes it.

1 Private Banks with less than six partners may by law issue notes in London; and joint-stock Banks may by law draw and accept bills, provided they run for more than six months after date.

The Bank of England is about the closest corporation that ever existed. It is managed by twenty-four directors, who furnish no accounts to the proprietors. Eight go out of office every year and eight come in; when the period of election draws near, the directors make out a house list of the names of those they wish to have as colleagues, and the house list is uniformly voted. This body is absolute in the extreme, and perfectly free to act as it sees fit under all circumstances. It is led by no authority, and restrained by no responsibility. Some of the directors, as, for instance, Mr. Horsley Palmer before the secret committee of 1832, have occasionally taken credit to themselves for going with public opinion. We shall presently be able to mark the justice of their pretensions in this respect.

If there is any one point upon which more than upon another public opinion is now, and has for some time been, thoroughly made up and endur-ingly settled, it is, we apprehend, upon this - that the Bank of England has the complete control and absolute management of the currency of the whole country; and that the losses which the country has now, for some fifty years or so, sustained by repeated abuses of that currency, in the hands of the Bank, have been incalculable. So wild and extravagant have been the alternate expansions and contractions; so suddenly and capriciously have the value of money and prices been jerked up and tossed down, that it is not at all unreasonable to compare the Bank directors to a set of awkward showmen at a fair, with the trading interests of the nation in a great ill-contrived swing-swong, which at one moment they fling up high in the sky, and at another bring down so low as to drag the ground and rake the gutters with it: a violent recreation, which, at its highest elevation, few heads can sustain without bewilderment, and, at its lowest depression, none can endure without much suffering and disgust. Public opinion, I venture to assert, has long been settled in these respects; how, then, can it be pretended, with any show of truth, that the Bank has gone with public opinion?