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sending forth an additional issue of its notes. Why had the government resorted to that scheme? Because a cry had been raised throughout the country against the weight of taxation; and they saw no other way of getting rid of it. It was his opinion, that the public at large had received considerable benefit from that issue. It had led to a reduction of some of the assessed taxes, and also to converting the five per cent stock into four per cent stock, and the four per cent stock into 3 per cent stock. He believed there was some sense in this argument. - The House would further observe, that the government had entertained some fear that it would not be able to pay the dissentients to their plan of reducing the different stock, and had therefore asked the Bank, whether it' would pay them for it. The Bank agreed to do so; and he believed had done so to the amount of six millions, which occasioned another extensive issue. The House would likewise observe, that the government reduced the interest on Exchequer-bills to 24 per cent-a circumstance which, combined with the issues of the Bank, had driven all the gold out of the country. All persons who held these bills during the war, when they found that they could no longer receive the high rate of interest which they had formerly received upon them, engaged in foreign loans, and risked their capital in the various wild projects which rose up, one after the other, with unexampled rapidity. If he were asked to lay his hand on his heart and to say, what he believed to have been most instrumental in producing the late rise in prices, and the numerous schemes which had been foisted on the credulity of the public, he should answer, the reduction of interest on Exchequer-bills; and he now said, that the wisest thing for the government to do was to pay on the unfunded part of their debt a rational interest. He should, perhaps, be told, that by that reduction of interest a saving of 200,000l. or 300,000l. had been effected to the country; but, allowing that to be the case, he did not conceive it to be of sufficient advantage to counterbalance the evils which it had created. He recollected, that at the time when all these reductions were effecting, the right hon. gentleman opposite was holding out to the country, that the prosperity of which he boasted so much was founded on a solid and substantial basis. That declaration, coming from so high a quarter, had ex

cited a confidence which would not otherwise have existed among the dealers in shares of the several joint-stock companies. The repeal of the bubble act increased that confidence; as did the vote which two or three of the ministers gave in favour of some of the new companies; especially of that which went to erect new docks where no dock at all was wanted. He thought the conduct of ministers in voting for such measures very reprehensible; and the remarks which so humble an individual as himself had made upon the subject, had had the effect of inducing the hon. Secretary for Foreign Affairs to leave the House without voting. That confidence was still further augmented by the circumstance of the right hon. the President of the Board of Trade having become president of a company for the breeding of silk-worms-very innocently he had no doubt, and without any interested motives and by the daily annunciation in the newspapers, that several of the ministers patronized other schemes for the improvement of the national resources. Conduct like this could not fail to produce an effect upon the country; and he therefore thought that when they were discussing the cause of difficulties like the present, and were laying all the blame of them on the country bankers, they ought to reserve a little share of it for those who had not turned the mind of the public in the proper direction, when they were enabled to do so, by their talents, their eloquence, and their information. After pursuing these topics at considerable length, and remarking, that two schemes had been proposed either as a remedy for the present, or a preventive of future distress; namely, the substitution of a gold in lieu of a paper currency, or the compelling bankers to deposit security for the notes they issued-the worthy alderman proceeded to ask, whether the present was the time for carrying either scheme into effect? He thought it was not. The country was not in a situation at present to bear the operation which would restore it to health and prosperity. Before either measure was attempted to be carried into execution, the government must restore the confidence and revive the credit of the country. There was no occasion for hurry. Delay would do good, and precipitation would certainly occasion mischief. If the House would let it go forth to the country, that it was not at present prepared to destroy every thing relating to country banks; that it was willing to suspend its plans; that it would appoint a committee to examine, and would allow things to get cool again before it proceeded to legislate, it would do all that could be expected from it in the present emergency; and yet, even -a determination so to act would be adopted too late. They might pass what resolutions they pleased that night-they might carry it with as high a hand as they pleased-they would nevertheless soon be compelled to retrace their steps; as such a convulsion would result from them as they were not prepared for. All men of sense and information viewed the situation in which the country was placed with apprehension and alarm. They were placed in circumstances in which talent and refined wit and eloquence were not only not calculated to do good, but were even likely to produce harm. They were discussing a dry matter of business, which affected the comforts and well-being of every man in the nation. Gentlemen ought, therefore, to consider that they had a serious duty to perform. It might be true that government had warned the country of their folly in embarking in these speculations; but it was not less true, that it was the duty of the government to protect its subjects from their errors when they had once got into them. Let them abandon theory, and look to practical experience. If they did not, this old country with all its artificial relations of society, would be torn entirely to pieces. Let them pursue their principles of free trade but a little further, and they would drive every bit of gold out of the country. Free trade between countries where there was a reciprocity of interest to support it, might exist with benefit to both parties; but, free trade between countries which had nothing in common, of which one was sinking under a weight of taxation, and the other was almost untouched by it, could not exist without enriching the latter country at the total ruin of the former. If government would carry the principles of free trade into practice, it ought to commence by establishing a free trade in corn. It knew, however, that it could not establish such a trade; neither was he sure that such a trade ought to be established. In saying this, he knew that he was going against all the doctrines in favour of cheap bread, which were so popular, at the eve of a general election; but it was impos

sible to deny that if they had bread at a cheap rate, the poor lands must be thrown out of cultivation; and if they were thrown out of cultivation the agricultural population would be thrown out of employment; and if they were thrown out of employment, where were the manufacturers to find a vent for their different manufactures? He knew that the political economists saw no evil in such a state of things: they had no objection to turn the agricultural labourers into mechanics, and the 'squires and the clergy into drapers and tailors, if profit were the result of the conversion. Profit was the perpetual burden of their song. If profit could be ultimately obtained, they overlooked the misery which was created in the interim. So long as they had profit before them, it mattered not whether all the aristocracy, clergy, and gentry of the country were turned topsy-turvy, and all the relations of society destroyed in one general convulsion. The country had grown great by the wise and cautious measures of our forefathers. He trusted that it would adhere to the plan upon which they had achieved its past and present greatness. If it did so, it would go on prospering and to prosper; and if it did not, it would sink, (he was afraid, day after day, into deeper ruin. He implored the right hon. the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, to employ his great talent and extensive information in the investigation of this subject, to trust to his own goodness of heart, which he knew to be most excellent; to give fair play to his own admirable understanding, and to look at practice rather than at theory. If he did so, future generations would hail him as the benefactor of his country: if not, he would plunge it into a sea of troubles, out of which he might endeavour, but in vain, to extricate it.

Mr. Secretary Peel said, that in immediately following the hon. gentleman who had just sat down, he would endeavour to take advantage of his precept, by confining himself as much as possible to the subject under the consideration of the House. He could not, however, forbear expressing some surprise that the gentleman who had uttered that precept had himself so far departed from it as to introduce to the notice of the House a bill which he had formerly brought under its consideration; and that the hon. gentleman in adverting to that bill, had dwelt rather upon the speech which introduced it, than upon the measure itself. He had spoken, however, in such flattering terms of that speech, that he could easily forgive the hon. member for having noticed it, irrelevant even as it was. He would not only obey the precept, but he would improve upon the practice of his great preceptor, by not saying one word of queen Elizabeth, or upon any other of the variety of topics to which the hon. gen. tleman had adverted, and which seemed to give him so much pain. The hon. gentleman had chosen a wide field for discussion; but over that extensive field it was not his intention to follow him. Some part of his representations as to the distress of the country, and its commercial embarrassments, he regretted he was obliged to admit. The continuance of them, in a considerable degree, he admitted also; and further he regretted, that he could not accurately see the end of them. He might also commence his address, by expressing his entire conviction, that if the House would give effect to the measure of his right hon. friend, they would discover, that those causes, which had been alleged by some as the operating causes of the present distress, were not in fact those to which that distress was properly attributable.

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might further declare his entire conviction of the absolute necessity, on the part of the House, of turning their attention to the state of the currency of the country; and, notwithstanding what had already been observed on that subject, notwithstanding the doubts and predictions of some hon. gentlemen - he should not be deterred from exhorting the House, immediately to turn its attention to wards the subject of the currency. He would ask, with the utmost confidence, whether it was possible for any man, who looked at the facts and arguments already produced in the course of this discussion,

of his noble friend in another place. Those expressions were not, as was seemed to be supposed, directed against the individuals concerned in country banking, but against the system itself-a system which was alone responsible for the evils that flowed from it, and which, therefore, justly deserved the language which had been applied to it. If his right hon. and noble friends, instead of saying generally, that the spirit of speculation was fostered and encouraged by the system of country banks, and the conduct of country bankers, had said, in so many words, that he hated them as scandalous, that he execrated them as abominable, then it must be admitted that the phrases employed were hardly justifiable. The whole course of one hon. gentleman's speech seemed to have been directed to raise the imputation that the government had been industriously employing itself to blacken the character of the country bankers. Now, he must beg leave to disclaim that imputation in the most distinct manner. He, for one, entertained the sincerest respect for many of the gentlemen engaged in banking business in the country; he firmly believed there was as large a portion of honourable men in that class, as in any other; but, when he said so, he still claimed the privilege of a member of parliament to speak of them and of their conduct, in the same free manner as he would speak of the conduct of any other men exercising public functions, or filling private stations, whose duties and responsibilities almost amounted to public functions. What, he would ask, were country banks? At present there were eight hundred of these establishments in the country, issuing notes, which formed a considerable portion of its circulating medium. Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, when speaking of the distresses in the year 1793, and considering the nature and the

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to hesitate for a moment upon the ques-effect of country banks, he stated, that it

tion, whether he would permit the currency to remain in its present state. For a period now of nearly thirty years had that currency stood upon an insecure and a defective basis; and, with every disposition to protect the interests of the country bankers, he must claim the right of examining with perfect freedom the different bearings of this important question. In doing so, he could not but express his astonishment at the feelings entertained by some gentlemen with regard to the expresaions of his right hon. friend near him, and

was uncertain to what their exact number amounted, but he computed them at 288. Since that time, that number had greatly increased; and at the present moment they amounted to no less than 800, issuing, as he had said before, notes that formed the circulating medium of the country, and in which the active labour and industry of the country was paid. Respecting these banks, the hon. member had stated a fact, in which he found a strong presumption, that the present system of country banks was imperfect. That hon. member had

declared, that the issues of country bankers | the indefinite extension of the present sys

could hardly be estimated or foreseen; since one country banker might make an over-issue, as he could not know to what extent the issue was made by another. That fact seemed to have been stated by the hon. member as a vindication of the country banks. But that vindication was in truth not their blame, but the blame of the system, and of the system alone. The hon. member for Staffordshire had said, in the beginning of the debate, that the increase of the issue of bank notes was not to be imputed as a fault to the country bankers, for it was the tendency of bank notes to increase with the increase of prices. He agreed with the hon. baronet -the fault alluded to was not the fault of the country bankers; it was not the fault of individuals; but of the system which they were engaged in conducting-a system that almost compelled them to assist in creating the evils of which the country now complained. That hon. member's proposition, however, did not go far enough; for he might have added, that not only would the increase of notes follow the increase of prices, but that they would decrease with the same rapidity, when prices fell; so that the tendency always existed in the system, to aggravate the evils of the country. It would act as a stimulus to speculation when the excitement was at its height; and when the weakness always consequent on fictitious excitement followed, it would increase that weakness, and add to the extent of the evil. These country banks, as they proceeded on their present system, contradicted that beautiful principle of mechanics on which the most powerful engines were constructed. In mechanics, when two powers were to be employed in order to attain one object, the principle on which they were united was this, that when one was contracted, the other would expand-when one was employed to disadvantage, the other would exert its utmost force, and thus supporting each other as each required support, they rendered the desired object sure of attainment. The country banks did the reverse of all this: they first increased the tendency towards the evil, and afterwards increased the evil itself. Hence it followed, that what formed the vindication of the individual, also offered the strongest ground for the condemnation of the system under which that individual acted. One argument of an hon. member had alarmed him; for it seemed to go to

VOL. XIV.

tem. It had been said, that the labourer was safer with the one-pound note than with the sovereign; and that when he received his note he ought to go to the savings'-bank, and there deposit it. Surely, when the labouring man was surrounded, as many must now be, with extreme distress, in consequence of the recent failures of country banks, it was not an answer to him, to say, "You are not to be pitied; the loss is all by your own fault; you might have lodged your money in a savings-bank," when, perhaps, the savingsbank was twenty miles distant from the place in which the poor man lived?-But, these were topics not immediately connected with the question before the House; he would, therefore, leave them, and confine himself strictly to it. He would request the House to consider what evils country banks had produced in the time more particularly within their own memory. And here he would beg the House not to suppose that he was inclined to overstate the evil-attributable to the circulation of the one and two pound notes of the country banks. All he meant to say was, that the tendency to speculation was increased by them, and that that circumstance, combined with the fluctuation of prices which it occasioned, was productive of real inconvenience in all cases, and of positive misery in many. It was easy to attack the measure of his right hon. friend, and to say that there was no remedy for the present evils in his resolution. Why, the resolution did not pretend to provide a remedy; it only tended to destroy that cause, which, added to excessive speculation, had produced so many distresses. The hon. member for Taunton, in criticising the resolution, had said, that it was merely skin-deep-that it was milk and water-that it was totally nugatory that it was founded on vain principles-that the house was on fire, and that it was necessary to provide for the safety of those who were trembling in the garret. Now, he had listened with great attention to the means which the hon. member had proposed to rescue the people in the garret; and he found that the only ladder for escape which the hon. member offered to them was one which was liable to the very same exception which had been made against the measure proposed by his right hon. friend, the chancellor of the Exchequer. He was now alluding to the proposal of the hon. member for

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Taunton to make silver a legal tender to | 1816; and that, in the late eventful crisis,

there were 76 failures among the bankers of the country and the metropolis. For the reason he had stated, he should be justified in estimating the general amount of failures much higher than appeared by the returns of the commissions, it would not, perhaps, be too much to say, that the failures were four times as many as the bankruptcies; and it would, therefore, be a fair way of estimating the amount, by multiplying the number of commissions by four, during the series of years he had stated. Why then, he would ask, could any system be worse, or more prejudicial to every interest in the community, than one which, like the one at present subsisting, admitted of so enormous an amount of failures? Let the House now look at what had been the case, under a different system, in Scotland. It would be seen, by the evidence taken before the com

any amount. One half of the hon. member's speech went to prove that that was an important measure, and worthy of serious consideration. He believed that it was so; but still it was as little calculated to give immediate relief as any proposition which could be mentioned. When he said that the hon. member's suggestion was an important one, he only meant that it deserved consideration. He was of opinion, that, if adopted, it would be necessary to accompany it with a measure to guard against any fluctuation in the price of silver; that it would be necessary to revise it from time to time; so that if there should be an increase in the quantity of silver, the man who had contracted an obligation in gold should not be allowed to discharge it in silver. He was going, however, to take a view of the evil in which this system had placed us, when he was led, unintentionally, into another di-mittee in 1819, that a Mr. Gilchrist, who

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gression. He could not help thinking that if, in the year 1793, a set of banks had been established in this country, on the system of the Scotch banks, it would have escaped the danger in which it was then involved, as also the calamity which now impended over it. Now, when the hon. alderman referred to the maxims of our ancestors, and conjured the House to follow them strictly, he wished he would himself abide strictly by the advice he had given to others. It would not be an unapt illustration of the subject to refer to the state of the banking system in 1793. What was the number of failures which had taken place among country banks in that year? Why, not less than 100. Yorkshire there were 12 commissions of bankrupt against country bankers; in Northamptonshire 7; in Lincolnshire 7; in Sussex 6; in Lancashire 5; in Leicestershire 9-all issued in the year 1793. And these commissions, it must be remembered, by no means showed the number of failures; because, by means of compositions, and in various other ways, the concerns of many of the bankers who were unable to go on were arranged so as to avoid bankruptcy. But, since these were the only data afforded him towards ascertaining any thing like the amount of failures, he would state the number of commissions issued for some time after the year 1809. In 1810, it appeared that against country bankers 26 commissions were issued; 4 in 1811; 17 in 1812; 18 in 1813; 29 in 1814; 26 in 1815; 37 in

had been a manager of one of the banks there for many years, was asked, how many banks had failed in Scotland within his memory. His reply was, that there had only been one; that the creditors were immediately paid 14s. in the pound as a dividend, and, upon the winding-up of the concern, the whole of their demands. If, then, the consequences of the system of banking had been to produce the number of failures in England which he had stated, while, during the same period, there had been only one in Scotland, was that not a strong presumptive proof that the system of the latter, if not quite perfect, was at least far preferable to that under which we had been so long acting? The mass of distress which must have been occasioned by the failures in England, was too extensive a subject to be now entered into. It had been felt not only by the commercial world; it had extended itself to the lower classes of society. He was inclined to look upon the effect which the present system of country banks had upon the payment of the wages of the labouring classes as one of the greatest of the evils it produced. It had been. he thought, satisfactorily proved, that the tendency of that system was to encourage speculation at one time, and at another to add to the languor which might affect the commercial interests of the country. For the benefit of the labouring classes chiefly it was, that he wished to see this altered, and that the manner in which their wages were paid

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