The Sun.
London, England, 1844-04-08 00:00:00

that pu' lie opinion will prevent a repeti ion of the
ror.., boy, 1_,.401,AlO erior of whit:h the Allail has been guilty in ,his par- ;
• .kt• ci tieu'ar.

-- ~-

-,.---,-
T,•ii'. FUNDS-(CLOSING PRICES).
BRITISH FUNDS.
Bvnk Stock ..... ........ ..... 1i:9% Indian Stock — ra.
-, rer Cent. 1ted,..... ..... .. 419% Ditto Bonds -
3 pet Cent. Cons. ...... ... It 0 Ditto Oil Annuities
3)6 per Cent. Rei .... ..... 102% Ditto New Annuities —
New 3)6 per Cent...„..... 103% iEx. Bills, 1,0001. 130 — pm..
:New S per Cent............. 1 Ditto 500/ .....
-Long Annuities to expire 1 Ditto 5ma11........
Jan. 160 12% 'Bank Stocit for Acct.... i'll)2
Oct. 1859.....- ,Consols for Acct...„..... 99%
Jan. 1860.....„ 'lndia Stock for Acct.... 293
FOREIGN FUNDS.
Austrian, 5 per Cent .... ..... Portuguese, 5 per Cent —
Belgian, 5 per Cent........... Ditto, New Ditto —
Brazilian Bonds . ....... „..... 80 Prussian, 5 per Cent
Buenos Ayres, 6' per Ce-it... Russian, 5 per Cent —
Chllian, 6 per Cent ............ Ditto, Metallic
Colombian, 6 per Cent
Ditto, 1824 ............. .........
Cuba Bonds, 6 per Cent 93 Ditto, Deferr& 15%
Di nish,'3 per Cent ....... ..... French, 5i er Cent....... —I --ei
Greek, 18 5.5 per Cent...-. Exchange —f. —c.
Mexican, 5 per Cent ..... ... French, 3 per Cent. —f. --c.
Ditto, 6 per Cent., 1837...... ..... Dutch, 2% per Cent...-. 6.i %
Peruvian, 1825, 6 per Cent...
_,.., _ Ditto, 5 per Cent lOO%
.._

JOINT-STOCK BANKS.
The now number of the British and Foreign Re-
view contains an article under the title of " Coin an :I
Currency." The article, instead of discussing fully
and fearlessly the question of banking, which occu-
pies so much of public attention at this moment, prin-
cipally consists of a retrospect of the history of bank-
ing in England. So far, however, as the writer's
views can be discovered from the casual references to
the principles on which the business of banking ought
to be conducted, he concurs with us in the opinion
that the joint-stock banks have been of the greatest
service to the country, and that any attempt on the
part of the Government to interfere with them ought
to be resisted by every constitutional means.
'There is a very decided and general impression in
the monetary circles of the country, that Ministers
contemplate some important changes in reference to
the constitution and powers of the joint-stock bank-
ing companies. The impression, we fear, is too well
grounded. Deputation after deputation from the
directors of the joint-stock banks have, within the
last few weeks, waited on Sir Robert Peel, with a
view to learn his intention in relation to these esta-
blishments. Not an atom of information on the sub-
ject could be elicited from him. He shrouds his
designs in the deepest darkness. The conclusion to
which the joint-stock banking companies have con-
sequently come is, that he does meditate some inva-
sion of their powers and privileges. If he do in any
way assail these associations, he will soon discover
that he never committed a greater act of folly for
himself, as he could not contemplate one more fraught
with evils to the country. It will be strange indeed
if, instead of curtailing the exclusive privileges of the
Bank of England, as every one expected he would
when the question of a renewal of the charter came
to be d'scussed, he should bring forward a measure
for abridging the resources and impairing the useful-
ness of the joint-stock banks.
Though the Premier persists, in defiance of all the
entreaties for information, of those who are most in-
terested, in concealing his intentions either as regards
the colossal corporation in Threadneedle-street or the
joint-stock banks throughout the country, the period
is at hand when he must make an unreserved revela-
tion of his plans and purposes. Immediately after the
Easter recess he is to make an exposé of his intentions
and measures in reference to the question of the cur-
rency. Until then, we suppose, we must wait with phi-
losophical patience. One feature, we have reason to be-
lieve, in hisfuture banking policy, will be to deprive the
joint-stock banks of their right to issue notes of their
own, and to confer on the Bank of England the ex-
clusive privilege of making paper issues. There is
something so evidently fraught with the most serious
mischiefs to the monetary interests of the country, in
any scheme of this kind, that did not what seems to
us irresistible evidence .of the fact crowd upon us
from all quarters, we could not believe that such an
idea had ever entered the Premier's mind. To with-
draw from the joint-stock banks the privilege of
issuing their own notes, will be in many, perhaps the
majority of cases, the same as if these banks were to
be annihilated by Act of Parliament. Sir Robert
Peel professes to be a great stickler for maintaining
vested interests : if he carry his understood intention
into effect, he will earn for himself tbe unenviable re-
putation of having committed a wholesale robbery of
the shareholders in joint-stock-banking companies.
Divest them of the right to issue their own notes, and
you despoil them at once of their property. Their
main source of profit lies in their having a paper issue
of their own. It was on the faith of such right being
continued that they commenced business; without it
business could not, in many instances, be carried on
without incurring a ruinous loss. Consequently,
should the Premier persist in his understood purposes,
the joint-stock banking business will receive a blow,
from the effects of which it will never recover.
Nor will the injury in the supposed case be con-
fined to the shareholders : it will be extended to and
deeply felt by the public. The infinite service which
the joint-stock banks have been able to render to the
country, has been chiefly through means of their
privilege to make issues of their own paper. The
country knows, and is forward to acknowledge, the
services of the joint-stock banks. But for them the
national distress would, in times of pressure, have
issued, in all probability, in a national bankruptcy.
They alone, on repeated occasions, have neutralised
the injurious effects of capricious contractions of the
currency, on the part of the Bank of England.
To deprive the joint-stock banks of the right to
issue notes of their own, and to place, as it is sup-
posed the Premier means to do, the entire paper cur-
rency of the country in the hands of the monetary
monopolists in Threadneedle-street, would be one
of the most audacious anti-free-trade deeds ever
perpetrated. It would be the grossest outrage and
greatest insult to the country, which ever
Toryism committed in the days of its unresisted do-
mination. The country loudly complains of the
extent to which it already suffers from the caprices
of the Bank of England ; and Peel purposes to
place the nation still more at the mercy of that gigan-
tic establishment. The cry everywhere is—in Eng-
land, Scotland, and Ireland, for an abridg Dent of the
present powers of the Bank ; and Peel purposes to
confer upon it much more enlarged and important
powers than ever. The country calls, in the spirit of
free-trade principles, for an extinction of the mone-
tary monopoly so long enjoyed by the Bank ; and
the Premier intends to make that monopoly greater
than before. This is progress in free-trade principles
with a vengeance. It is the crab-like progress of
going backwards.
But will Ministers succeed in carrying out their
currency projects? It will be passing strange if they
do. We have too much faith in the omnipotence of
public opinion, when fairly and fully expressed, to
suppose that any Government will be suffered to an-
nihilate the joint-stock banks, merely to play into
the hands of a corporate band of monopolists, who
are ambitious of possessing an exclusive control over
the currency, and the consequent monetary destinies,
of the country. Of this we are certain—that the
most vigorous and determined opposition which Peel
has had to encounter on any measure, is now in the
; course of organisation on this question.—Advertiser.
of

SHARES.
Birmingham and Derby (100 paid)... ..... .. ........ 62%
Birmingham and Oloucester (100 paid) 96y4
24
Ditto New (17% daid)
Bristol and Exeter (70 paid) 7 1.4
Bristol and Gloucester (3,1 pain)
Eastern Counties (23 paid) ......
Great North of England (100 paid) 99
Great Western (75 paid)
Ditto Half Shares (50 paid)
Ditto Fifths (12 paid) 1,.%
233
Gr..nd Junction (100 paid) . ....
Harwieh !Braithwaite) (2 paid
Harrowgate and Knarestioro. 3 paid)......... 3%
Lancaster and Cardsle ( 5 pai ) 7%
London and Brighton (54) paid)
London and Blackwall (161. Ids. 4d!) t %
Norwich and Brandon (112
paid) 7i
Rouen and Havre (g p )
31
South Eastern and Dover (50 paid) ,
Strasbourg and Bale (14 paid) H
York and North. Midi and (50 paid) HI
Ditto New (25 paid) ....ern.... .......... ..
York and Scarborough Branch (..)Q paid) .....

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.

FROM THE EVENING PAPERS OF THIS DAT.
GLOBE.—The Times of this morning has the fol.
lowing diatribe against the tendencies of the age we
live in :—" For legislating upon utilitarian principles,
—for embodying in public enactments, made for the
benefit (!) not of the law-givers but of others,—
the detestable morality of Hobbes and Hume and
Gibbon ;—for realising in practice that species of poli-
tical morality which holds that man is no more than
an impersonation of capital—a mere representative of
so much labour,'—that charity is only a falsifica-
tion of economy,—and that that benefit of the
governed,' which it is universally conceded ought to
he the object of every Goverment,—is nothing else
than the highest possible state of productiveness' to
which the aforesaid subject multitude may be
brought ;—for legislation of this sort, we say, give us
the days of Kin.. William and Queen Victoria, for
certainly never before,' since England was a nation, has
this sort of thing been more consistently carried out
within the walls of Parliament." Would that
any spark of the dry light of intellect of
Hobbes or of Hume—would that any vestige of the
painful and diligent research of Gibbon—were in-
deed, as the Times most monstrously alleges, " con-
sistently carried out within the walls of Parliament."
Of course we have nothing to say of the religious
Scepticism of these highly distinguished men—no-
thing except what Bacon, perhaps, might have said—
that they had better have left religion unreasoned
about—have left faith in possession of her rights, and
reasoned where reason could hope to arrive at posi-
tive and practical conclu ions. But that a slap-dash
piece-work plasterer of diurnalism should flatter him-
self that he can smear over the great names of Hume
and Gibbon—that he, in his Puseyite muddle-headed-
miss, can obscure all their genius has enlightened—
that' he con consign to reprobation all that distin-
guishes modern times from the middle ages—is truly,
to concentrate a whole revived Order of Jesuits in
his own little person !
Vite, site, morbleu ! -
Eteienons les lumiCres—
Et rallumons le feu!
It is very true that neither Hume nor Gibbon, nor
any close thinker, nor conscientious researcher of
the last century, traded in clap-trap sentiments. The
fitter prototype of Times newspaper philanthropy was
the hollow-hearted, selfish, canting Rousseau—the
caricaturist, by dint of exaggeration, of every exalted
sentiment—the exemplar of every human depravation
which (self-induced) cerebral derangement alone could
excuse. But when the Times was "pitching into" the
direction impressed on legislative intellect in these our
degenerate days by the still surviving influence of the
great minds of the last century, why had it no word
of abuse for Turgot ? Because there are names
which even the Times dare not desecrate. Because
the Times, in the thickest haze of its recent High
Church inspirations, has probably a sort of glimmering
idea that in Turgot it would fall foul of a statesman
who demonstrated practically, in twelve years of unob-
trusive provincial administration, the wisdom of the
modern economical principle of " promoting the highest
possible productiveness" by admitting the utmost pos-
sible fi'eedom of industrial and commercial transactions.
No, no !—it has not besn philosophical scepticism
(dangerous as we allow that is, when pushed into re-
gions where positive truth cannot be arrived at by
process of mere reasoning)—it is not philosophical
scepticism that makes legislative inroads on social
abundance and happiness. We wish our legislators
had some of the wholesome scepticism of Turgot—
some of his aversion for all presumptuous dogma-
tism, whether philosophical or priestly. The name
of- Turgot will be ever identified with all the ra-
tional conquests of the spirit of modern improve-
ment. In his own days he stood aloof, on well-con-
sidered and high principle, from all those clique and
coterie influences on which lesser men lean so instinc-
tively. Turgot was a man of no party, and rio philo-
sophical sect. The men of sects and parties of course
took this exceedingly ill in him ; and could not under-
stand how any one could be amongst them, and not of
them. His friends amongst the philosophes reproached
him for not being of their mind : and he reproached
them in turn with the foolish attempt to impose a com-
munity of opinions, and thus assume responsibility for
those of each other. He detested all esprit de corps
(philosophical, not less than priestly), because he
found, says his congenial biographer, Dupont de
Nemours, that even amongst men otherwise estimable,
the sort of fanaticism inseparable from that spirit
seldom fails to alloy the love of truth and justice which
Turgot preferred to everything. The morality
sects the most scrupulous is never so good as that of
honest individuals ! In this spirit of clique and
coterie Turgot besides found this serious inconvenience
—that it. tended to excite animosity and prejudice in
sosiety at large against those little exclusive sects and
societies which formsthernselves in its bosom, and thus
retarded the succesi of the good intentions of thoSe
Nyli,:rn their zeal excited to form these confederations.
" It is the sprit of sect," he said, " that provokes the
spirit of persecution." It is certainly true that neither
Hume, nor Gibbon, nor Turgot, would have told the
labouring popu!ation that law could get them twelve
hours' wages for ten hours' work. Turgot never would
have• admitted into our cos me colonial arrangements
a fifth quarter of the globe as it were (if we may use
the Iricism), and charged our colonial estimates with
grants-now for South or West Australia—and now
for New Zealand—at the very time of declaring we
will not take the corn our colonies can send us !
STANDARD.—The zeal with which the opposi-
tion journals pursue the misrepresentation first started
by the Dubtin Evening Mail, proves that the letter,
imputed falsely to Sir Robert Peel by the Irish jour-
nal, possesses more than a local interest. We shall
he excused, therefore, by those least interested in
Irish affairs, if we return to the subject. The utter
falsehood of theDublinEvening Mail's story is proved
by a passage in the Dublin Statesman of Wednesday
the 4th inst., which the Dublin Evening Mail of the
following Friday has not ventured to contradict.
.The Statesman is a journal of nearly the same
political character as the Mail, but the fact that the
Mail has not ventured to deny that its " appalling
cotinnunicatiee'' was a hoax, or to contradict the
assertion that its friend and prompter, Mr. Frederick
Shaw, had denounced the utter falsehood of that com-
munication, is decisive. We repeat what we said on
th • '22d of March, " There was not one word of
trutla in it." The purpose of the falsehood, by
whomsoever invented, is apparent by a passage of a
later number of the Dublin Evening Mail (March 29).
The falsehood, then, was invented for the purpose of
thawing the Ministry—a purpose which men may
think legitimate or not, but which certainly does not
justify to moralists the use of falsehood as a means,
and will scarcely justify to politicians of enlarged and
patriotic views the formation of an anti- Saxon alli •
ante in Ireland, the arrangement which the falsehood
was intended to promote. As we are speaking of
a resort to illegitimate means, it may be proper
to note a very irreverent and disgusting parody
which the Dublin Evening Mail of Friday has
thought fit to publish with reference to the
matter of which we are speaking. The Mail
does not, as we have 6aid, venture directly
. to support the veracity of its " appalling com-
munication" of March 20, but it presents a
parody of the third chapter of Daniel, in which
Sir Robert Peel acts the part of Nebuchad-
nezzar, and the Archbishop of Armagh (Lord
John Bevesford), and other prelates and cler-
gymen are made to represent, Sha,drach, Meshach,
and Abednego. We feel scarcely at ease in shortly
describing such a thing—and we hope that it is as
disagreeable to the most Reverend Archbishop as
it is td us. About twenty-seven years ago Mr.
Hone • was prosecuted for publishiug some paro-
dies upon the Liturgy, and none of them was so
offensive in form as this—none of them could be
so . indecent as a parody upon the Holy Scrip-
tures themselves. The Liturgy, beautiful as it is, is
still but the words of man, but the Holy Scriptures
are not the words of man. We certainly would not
wish to see prosecutions like that of which Mr.
Mae was the object repeated ; we much prefer trust-
ing to the effect of public opinion for the preventing
of such offences as his, 'and we have little doubt