l generations the Bank of England
was emphatically a Whig body. It was Whig, not accidentally, but
necessarily. It must have instantly stopped payment if it had ceased to
receive the interest on the sum which it had advanced to the government;
and of that interest James would not have paid one farthing. Seventeen
years after the passing of the Tonnage Bill, Addison, in one of his most
ingenious and graceful little allegories, described the situation of the
great Company through which the immense wealth of London was constantly
circulating. He saw Public Credit on her throne in Grocers' Hall, the
Great Charter over her head, the Act of Settlement full in her view. Her
touch turned every thing to gold. Behind her seat, bags filled with coin
were piled up to the ceiling. On her right and on her left the floor
was hidden by pyramids of guineas. On a sudden the door flies open. The
Pretender rushes in, a sponge in one hand, in the other a sword which
he shakes at the Act of Settlement. The beautiful Queen sinks down
fainting. The spell by which she has turned all things around her into
treasure is broken. The money bags shrink like pricked bladders. The
piles of gold pieces are turned into bundles of rags or faggots of
wooden tallies. [526] The truth which this parable was meant to convey
was constantly present to the minds of the rulers of the Bank. So
closely was their interest bound up with the interest of the government
that the greater the public danger the more ready were they to come to
the rescue. In old times, when the Treasury was empty, when the taxes
came in slowly, and when the pay of the soldiers and sailors was in
arrear, it had been necessary for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to go,
hat in hand, up and down Cheapside and Cornhill, attended by the Lord
Mayor and by the Aldermen, and to make up a sum by borrowing a hundred
pounds from this hosier, and two hundred pounds from that ironmonger.
[527] Those times were over. The government, instead of laboriously
scooping up supplies from numerous petty sources, could now draw
whatever it required from an immense reservoir, which all those petty
sources kept constantly replenished. It is hardly too much to say that,
during many years, the weight of the Bank, which was constantly in the
scale of the Whigs, almost counterbalanced the weight of the Church,
which was as constantly in the scale of the Tories.

A few minutes after the bill which established the Bank of E