"Strong, without rage - without o'erflowing, full !"

All was to be free, sound, secure, safe, and prosperous; no doubt was hinted, no dispute raised, as to the result: but what after all came to pass? What was the end of all these fine promises and glowing anticipations? Absolutely and positively nothing whatever! There never occurred a more complete failure. The favourite ticket that was to prove so invaluable a prize in the great lottery of fortune was drawn and it proved a common blank. The bolt that was to illuminate the globe was launched under the most favourable circumstances, and it fell back to the earth without light or effect, a mere brutum fulmen. Peel's Bill was passed; cash payments were resumed, and the Ricardo ingots of sixty ounces each were piled behind the Bank counters: but no one took them; the spirits came from the vasty deep when they were called, but no one visited them when they had come. They lay unsolicited, unnoticed, and unused; while panics, runs for gold, fluctuations in the currency, and all the old vicissitudes of periods of high prosperity, alternating with seasons of extreme scarcity and stagnation of trade, recurred with as deplorable a frequency and intense severity as ever.

It would now be difficult to assign a tenable reason for surprise or regret at the failure of the gold bar payment scheme, upon which it is impossible to look as anything short of an ingenious cheat. It was a pretence that made a show of paying in gold, without really doing so. The contrivance was studiously prepared to make the payment so inconvenient, that although the gold was to be obtained, people would prefer going without it. It was an announcement of which the true meaning was this - "Good people, if you want gold, here it is; take it if you like it: but before you do take it, pray pause a moment, and observe how clever I am. 'Tis in a shape the most difficult for use when you have it. - Now tell me, will it not suit you better to leave it, rather than to take it under such circumstances?"

After this fresh illustration of the old adage of nothing new under the sun, furnished by the exposure and decline of the Ricardo mania, some years elapsed during which it appeared to be generally felt that it was useless to complain, that the case was hopeless, and that the only relief attainable was the poor one derivable from a patient endurance of our fate. At length another doctrine came to be enforced with a high hand, I mean that for regulating the currency and keeping the circulation of Bank notes steadily proportioned to the wants of commerce, which soon claimed serious attention, because it was recommended to public notice as a practical measure, and appeared a legitimate deduction from the experience of the system so long and so oppressively in operation. This is now commonly called Mr. Samuel Jones Loyd's rule of regulating the issues of the Bank of England by the foreign exchanges, a rule promulgated by one of the earliest of our modern pamphleteers upon the currency, Mr. H. Thornton, and of which it will be proper to take due notice. It will, however, be probably better not to advert to this matter in detail until the Bank of England itself, and the panics that have arisen under the administration of the currency by that establishment, have been more particularly described.