The Sun.
London, England, 1844-12-02 00:00:00

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We take leave to indulge in a few Parliamentary
reminiscences connected Nith the Bank Charter
Bill of last session, which appear to us to have an
important bearing on some features of our present
monetary and commercial condition, to which we
adverted on Saturday, and return to-day. On the
6th of May last Sir ROBERT PEEL, in a speech of
three hours' duration, expounded his views on the
Currency question, and on the theory and working
of banking institutions; and on the 20th of the same
month he got the House of Commons to affirm a
series of resolutions embodying the measures pro-
posed to be taken by Government for the future re-
gulation of those institutions. The Bill founded on
these resolutions, and afterwards brought in, he de-
fined to be " a measure which would prevent our
commerce from future liability to those revulsions
which it had in past times been subject to—a mea-
sure intended as the complement of the Currency Bill
of 1819." The Right Hon. Gentleman had arrived
at an opinion—First. That there prevailed in the
country too great a tendency to commercial specula-
tion. Secondly. That this tendency was encouraged
by the facility—still too great—(notwithstanding the
desolation of the panic of 1825, produced by his re-
straining Bill of 1819)—for obtaining issues of money,
especially bank-notes. The point at which " legiti-
mate commerce" ceases and the illegitimate trade
that is identical with "speculation" begins, being, in
its nature, uncertain and undefinable—Sir ROBERT
applied to it a positive and fixed principle, and even
exemplified all the specific details of its mode of
action. He assumed, which in a commercial com-
munity of the first rank cannot be true, that specula-
tion in the abstract is an evil. Without speculation
however, commerce would soon retrograde, until it'
declined to a mere routine of commission trading un-
worthy of the name of commerce—without enter-
prise, without energy, without expansiveness, with-
out forecast, without any chances of that abounding
success which has been the proud reward of our
maritime spirit in all former time. The Premier bad
already hit upon the notable expedient of a moveable
double-action standard of value. He declared the
value of gold, as coined money, to be immutable,
and pinned it down to 3/. 17s. 100. per ounce. He
left the value of gold as metal, or bullion, a mer-
chandise and commodity, free to fluctuate with its
rise or fall in the bullion market. That which was
to supply a circulation of gold sovereigns bearing,
each of them, an immutable, specific value, was left
utterly mutable (as it is of necessity unascertainable
beforehand), both in quantity and in appreciation or
value. But if the quantity of gold in the world—
above ground, at least—or in the market at any given
future time, cannot be assigned by any man, it would
seem still more difficult for him to foretel either the
amount of property in the nation actually repre-
sented by symbolic money, or money of any kind—
or the amount of property which its holders might
be at any period to come desirous of converting into
money. How did the Premier set about obviating
these incipient difficulties in any scheme of monetary
reform ? .By throwing them overboard. The gold
mines of Peru, or the gold dust of Timbuctoo or of
Ashantee, may increase to any extent; the product
of the Ural Mountains may exceed its rapidly in-
creasing amount ; the caravans of Soudan or Sokatoo
may carry a twenty-fold multiplied number of pre-
cious bars to the gold traders at either extremity of
the Great Zahara next year ; or, if you will, all or
some of these sources of gold production may fail, or
simply decrease. No matter. Sir ROBERT finds a
starting point—namely, the assumed amount of gold
circulation in the kingdom, and the official returns of
Bank of England paper, and the note issues of joint-
stock banks, at any day he chooses to select for his
purpose. The gold and the notes together represent
the aggregate of the country's
_money circulation.
(NQ there ifs a redundancy of paper as corn-
nare4 saiittsisio,.-salki,e.vye ..A6-ne-uelljetntillts that
all paper currency inethe shape of bank-notes shall be
payable, upon demand, in gold. Alas, there is not in
the known circulation of the whole world one-half of
the paper circulation of Great Britain and Ireland.
What is to be done ? If the gold cannot come to the
notes, the notes must go to the gold. But how to
catch so vast an aggregate of notes in order to cut
them down to the limited dimensions of the gold
coinage ? To solve this problem, the Premier enacts
that notes of the Bank of England, or notes of their
own, convertible to gold on demand, shall be the only
currency in which the joint-stock and country
banks of issue shall deal ; and that since the Bank
of England shall be compellable, by his Act of Par-
liament, to hold in its strong room at all times a store
of bullion adequate to meet all its own outstanding
notes, if produced to it for payment, it is evident
that the Bank of England will equate the sum of
their own outstanding notes to their own stock of
bullion. Q. E. D. And in this way Sir R. PEEL
supposes he has adequately provided for the monetary
exigencies of a country (on a basis of gold and Bank
of England note circulation, on which all issues of
notes must henceforth be ultimately discharged, if
some thirty-seven, or say, in round numbers,
though far, very far, above the actual amount,
forty millions)—of a country of which the
yearly revenue collected in taxes, &c., is fifty-
seven millions, the national debt between 750 and
800 millions, the interest annually paid thereon
24 millions, and of which the foreign trade is so
enormous that the imports of a single year
amount, on a very moderate computation of value, to
150 millions ! The Bill of last session, in the face
of these admitted and notorious facts—in defiance of
the experience of those terrible convulsions of the
commercial world and mercantile credit which had
ensued within six years of the restoration of
the gold currency in 1819—convulsions which,
in 'a single twelvemonth, had far exceeded the
whole aggregate of the shocks occasioned by the
failures of private establishments from 1797, when

cash payments were suspended by the Bank of Eng-
land, to the year 1815, at the close of a war which
had cost us 500,000,0001.—this Bank Charter Bill
was unanimously passed. So contagious was the fatal
example of the Premier's propensity for tampering
with the free evolution of trade, and the action of our
monetary system—a tampering whose effects were

already traced in the bankruptcies of 1825-26, 1830,
and 1837-38—that Mr. ITAwEs's motion of the 10th

of June on the second reading of the Bank Charter Bill,
to the effect " that no case had been brought before the
House to justify the interference of the Legislature
ith the circulation of the banks of issue," was ne-
gatived by a majority of 155, in a house of 215
Members (185 to 30). Since 1819 the Bank had
been often reduced to the very verge of a stoppage,
owing to a rise in the market price of gold having
drained the coffers of that Company, who were com-
pelled, by the absurd enactment of 1819, to pay
their notes in gold, at the arbitrarily fixed Mint price
of that metal, instead of the current market price.
Yet, in 1844, the great majority of both

Houses kindly permitted the same absurdity
to be re-enacted. On the 14th of June last,

on Mr. MUNTZ'S amendment to the motion for

their going into Committee on the Premier's Bill,

n amely,

" on that day six months, "only eighteen

Members were found on the side of the lion. Mem-

ber for Birmingham against the Ministerial phalanx

of 205 supporters of the original motion. On the

6th July the Bill finally passed the Commons with-

out even a division. In the House of Lords, on the

motion for its second reading, 12th July, Lord Asn•
BURTON expressed his strong apprehensions that the

Government would find their Bill of by no means so
beneficial a tendency as they had anticipated—re-
marking, that upon their own showing, the objects it

proposed to accomplish could have been carried out

only by establishing a double standard of gold and
silver.

To these memoranda of the only divisions which
took place last session in Parliament upon the Bill,
...

we will only add one more not unimportant fact as a

preliminary to the further examination into which we

shall presently enter of this all important question,
more especially as considered in its relations to the
agitated demand for the repeal or modification of the
malt tax and the duty on tea. By the returns pub-
lished in last Friday's Gazette, it appears that the