I quote the following passages with pleasure; they are strong in truthful merit and energetic eloquence.

" Fluctuations in the amount of the currency are seldom, if ever, the original and exciting cause of fluctuations in prices and in the state of trade. The buoyant and sanguine character of the human mind; miscalculations as to the relative extent of supply and demand; fluctuations of the seasons; changes of taste and fashion; legislative enactments and political events; excitement or depression in the condition of other countries connected with us by active trading intercourse; an endless variety of casualties acting upon those sympathies by which masses of men are often urged into a state of excitement or depression; - these, all or some of them, are generally the original exciting causes of those variations in the state of trade to which the report refers. The management of the currency is a subordinate agent; it seldom originates, but it may, and often does, exert a considerable influence in restraining or augmenting the violence of commercial oscillations.

"What, then, were the originating causes of the recent commercial pressure?

"The succession of two bad harvests in a country afflicted with laws which render such an occurrence peculiarly oppressive to the community, and by a peculiar felicity in mischief, contrived to make monetary derangement, and consequently commercial pressure, the inevitable accompaniment of the misfortune of the seasons. The poison of impolicy is thus thrown into the fiendish cauldron of injustice, "For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth to boil and bubble."

"Be severe; but let your severity be tempered with a proportionate regard to justice. Condemn misconduct; but do it with discrimination. Trace every evil with unsparing research to its origin; but be sure that you reach the true source of it. Analyze the impure result by the severest test; but take care that you do not attribute to one cause alone, those effects which really indicate the presence of many deleterious principles. The phenomenon under your consideration is not a simple one, neither is the cause of it. Mismanagement of the circulation is not the primary source, it is only the contributory stream; and the foul water which it pours forth, flows from more than one polluted spring."

Notwithstanding the merit of these and other passages, there was something in the occasion and the defensive purport of this letter, by which - to use a common phrase - many of Mr. Loyd's more enthusiastic admirers were taken aback. It wore an air of caprice, if not a character of inconsistency. I presume not to say whether the writer felt this, or meant to do the Bank a friendly turn, believing it to be an injured establishment. Perhaps as Samuel Johnson, once the great critic of the Belles Lettres, would allow no one but himself to abuse Garrick, so Samuel Jones Loyd, who is equally potential as a censor in Banking, cannot patiently endure to see a new body like the Manchester Chamber of Commerce starting up and bustling forward, saucily to let off - if I may borrow a simile from the Scotch bagpipe - the drone of his thunder in what he conceives a rude and unartist-like manner.

This is a conjecture - let me turn to realities. The sun of Mr. Loyd's popularity was not long in rising above the mists and vapours engendered by the lecture he read the opponents of the Bank of England at our principal seat of manufactures. Very soon after the publication of his letter to Mr. Smith, appeared the best of his pamphlets, entitled "Remarks on the Management of the Circulation; and on the condition and conduct of the Bank of England and of the Country Issuers, during the year 1839" - Of this masterly tract I do not think it is too much to affirm, that nothing more clear or correct upon the abstruse and complicated questions it so admirably explains, has ever been written. The letter to Mr. Smith ought to have formed a part of the "Remarks," for they did, in the best manner possible, the very thing the letter reproved the Manchester Chamber of Commerce for attempting to do. I have already taken several quotations from it, and shall add some others: it is an inexpressible relief to me, and must, I should think, be still more agreeable to the reader, that I am thus able to diversify and improve my page with matter so full of merit and instruction.

After giving a summary, at once the shortest, neatest, and soundest I have ever read, of the progress of public opinion respecting the currency from the year 1819 to 1832 - Mr. Loyd proceeds to expose the errors of the Bank of England during the course of 1839. He exhibits the circulation deposits, securities, and bullion, in that and the preceding year, and then demonstrates in the most conclusive manner possible, that in 1839 the principles laid down by the directors in 1832 were wholly disregarded, and that if it had not been for the French Loan, the Bank must have been exhausted of specie.

The drain of bullion began in January, 1839, and the stream continued to ebb with velocity, each month showing a large decrease of volume, in the face of which the Bank continued to increase her issues.

At this rate the store of gold grew less and less until October, when there remained only 2,525,000l. So that if, for the sake of argument, we deduct from that sum the amount of the French loan, then the last and sole resource of the Bank, and which was just two and a-half millions, there will be only 25,000 sovereigns remaining.

Upon this state of embarrassment Mr. Jones enlarges with his usual penetration :

"The corresponding diminution in the liabilities of the Bank has fallen almost entirely upon the deposits; the decrease of the circulation within the same period amounting only to 600,000l. Thus we have a decrease of bullion of very large amount, and to so low a point that the position of the Bank is unquestionably rendered insecure, and without the aid of the foreign credit would probably have been desperate; whilst the decrease of circulation, by which alone this course of things could be checked, and the convertibility of the notes ensured, amounted only in October to the trifling sum of 600,000l.; and according to the rule, might have been nothing at all, if the depositors had thought proper further to increase their demands to that extent. Is not this a clear reduction of the rule to a practical absurdity; and a proof, that so long as it is applied to the joint liabilities, and not to the circulation exclusively, it affords no security whatever?