The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-10-18 00:00:00

TUESDAY MORNING, OCTOBER 18, 1842.

We have never attempted to conceal from the
readers of this journal our conviction, that to the
disgracefully reckless management of their joint stock
banks was to be attributed a great amount of the
commercial derangement which has recently visited
the neighbouring manufacturing districts. By the
instrumentality of these ill-conducted establishments,
men who but yesterday were moving in subordinate
stations—striving perhaps honestly to elevate them-
selves to competence or even affluence, husbanding
their hard-earned gains, and content to progress to-
wards their cherished object by the sure and steady
path trod by their fathers—have been suddenly lifted
up to the possession of almost boundless means,
encouraged to embark in every description of hazardous
investments, and have attained, by a short path, the
possession of apparent wealth and fictitious station.
Here was the secret of the inflated prosperity which
visited us six years ago—which covered the land with
mills, with railways, with mining and other specula-
tions of every degree of outrageous folly—which inun-
dated every foreign market with British merchandise,
and puffed up petty shopkeepers, spinners, and
weavers, into the substance of merchants—bubble
merchants, fungi, men of paper rags and spurious
credit—who jostled at every turn the steady and well-
informed possessor of that very capital from whose
putrescence they had sprung. Here was the fertile
cause of that giant increase of manufacturing produc-
tion and demand, from the cessation of which the
whole industrial community is at this moment steeped
in distress and suffering.

Pre-eminent amongst these overgrown and viciously-
directed establishments stood the Bank of Manchester
—in its working, and in the effects produced by that
working, AN ENIGMA, a marvel to all those who, like
ourselves, watched it from its first rising—an inex-
haustible producer of those wings with which beggars
fly—a giant bubble, covering the land with its frothy
spawn ! Unlike other similar concerns, this had, in
addition to its inherent rottenness, the vice of a poli•
tical bias in its management. The Bank of Man-
chester was WHIG in every pore. It bled only to feed
whiggery ; it blew only whig bubbles ; it was, from
the chairman of its board of directors down to the
scullion who dusted its counter, a brawling local whig
faction ! Was there a crawling and subservient poli-
tical drudge in the community, that man kept an
account with the Bank of 'Manchester, became fami-
liar with clean linen, exchanged his gossamer for a
beaver, and was observed to outstrip all his less sub-
servient competitors on the road to greatness. Was
there another, the obsequious follower of a Usurer's
steps, basking in his smile, toadying him, dining with
him, drinking with him, sitting with him in the con-
venticle, and huzzaing when he spluttered his specious
"liberalism" or his rabid radicalism from the platform:
—all at once you saw him become, no one knew how,
a merchant or a millowner; feed at his own table; sit
in his own carriage, and even open his lips to speechify
where before he durst only applaud ! Strange trans-
formations the world witnessed hourly ;—the worm of
yesterday fluttering in the sun, a gaudy butterfly to-
day, in mockery of the sober and prudent tradesmen,
into whose composition entered that noblest possession
of man, an independent spirit !
But the bubble itself was outgrowing its strength.
Its creatures were drawing from it its very vitals.
The capital, of which it boasted the nominal possession,
was absorbed in mills and machinery, for whose
productions there was no longer a demand ; was
scattered in foreign markets; was sunk in profitless
speculations at home. The inflated prosperity which
it had aided to create had passed away; the fictitious
value, at which it had enabled and tempted its crea-
tures to invest, was no more. Their mills, their man-
sions, their stocks of goods had sustained a depreciation
which threatened to sweep away the whole of the
imaginary profits of past years ; and the remedy was
to be sought in the reproduction—no matter by what
means—of that fickle and baseless prosperity out of
which their past greatness had ripened,—the repro-
duction of a commercial frenzy—a manufacturing
madness. To bring about that consummation arose—
THE ANTI-CORN-LAW LEAGUE!

The working of that seditious conspiracy is before
the world. Its reckless and mendacious agitation—
its ferocious attacks upon property and rank—its
exciting appeals to the brute force of the mob : these
were the despairing efforts of sinking men—the ex-
piring throes of a rotten system about to burst in ruin
over the heads of the brawlers. Its last stake was
hazarded when the vain attempt was made to drive
the working classes to a demonstration in favour of
the repeal of the corn-laws, or to an insurrection which
might be converted into such. It was a gambler's
throw in his desperation, and was lost ; and, as its
result, the wretched dupes of the League crowd our
prisons, or are on their way to linger out the remains
of a weary life in our penal settlements ; whilst the
Bank of Manchester, the fertile fountain of the dis-
organisation of society, out of which the stream of
sedition flowed in its desolating course, presents to the
world a spectacle of bankruptcy, superadded to cor-
ruption, such as can scarcely be paralleled in the com-
mercial history of any nation !
Let us glance at a few of the items which compose
the balance-sheet of this precious bank ; or, as a share-
holder appropriately terms it, this " MANCHESTER
SQUANDER !" The assets, consisting of current
accounts, hills on hand, overdue bills, and similar
trumpery securities, amount to £2,595,105 ; of this,
no less than £800,887 is the amount set down as
" bad," and how much more will turn out equally so
time only can determine. The directors have to
realise, to meet outstanding difficulties, no less than
£1,810,462, which, deducting the estimated nett
amount of the assets, shews a deficiency, to be provided
for by a call upon the already impoverished share-
holders, of £16,248 ! The ENTIRE CAPITAL, there-
fore, of £741,030 is IRRETRIEVABLY GONE, in addi-
tion to a reserved surplus fund and "profit for the
year"—(how can there be said to be any profit for
the year 2)—amounting to £43,609, with the deficiency
above mentioned, as still to be provided for by the
shareholders !

That such a state of things could be produced in
any well-regulated concern, or that it could result
from legitimate banking, no sane man can believe ;
and the report of the proceedings at the recent general
meeting, which we give in another column, will abun-
dantly shew that there has never been in the Bank of
Manchester, either good regulation or legitimate bank-
ing ! A managing director, now a bankrupt, it will be
seen, has been permitted to help himself and his friends,
notwithstanding the control of auditors, co-directors,
&c., to the large sum of £75,000. A firm in Man-
chester, who, a shareholder informed the meeting,
" could not have borrowed on their own security the
sum of £5OO for two years," have been allowed to over-
draw to the extent of £lBO,OOO ! A concern in a neigh-
bouring town has been allowed to overdraw to an
almost equally ruinous extent,—to carry on their legi-
timate business ? No ! To improve their property—
to build mansions and mills, to paint and to decorate.
" It is within my knowledge," said a shareholder at the
meeting on Friday, " that they have been recently lay.