, sixty or seventy banks had broken.
The king's speech in July had congratulated parliament on increasing
prosperity and had betrayed no misgivings about its stability. When the
crash came, however, the ministers showed no want of firmness or
resource. They could not repair the consequences of national folly, but
they devoted themselves with intelligence to a restoration of credit.
For this purpose they suppressed at once the further issue of small
notes from country banks by a high-handed act of authority, for which
they admitted that an act of indemnity might be needed. At the same time
they rapidly increased the supply of small notes from the Bank of
England, and of coin from the mint. Moreover, they induced the Bank of
England to establish branches in a few provincial towns and to make
advances upon merchants' goods to the amount of three millions. It cost
a greater effort to break down the monopoly of the Bank of England by
legalising joint-stock banks in the provinces, though not within a
distance of sixty-five miles from London. Such practical expedients as
these, seconded by the good sense of the mercantile community, proved
sufficient to avert a catastrophe only less disastrous than national
bankruptcy. With the subsidence of alarm, the causes of alarm also
subsided, the recuperative powers of the country reasserted themselves,
as during the great war, and the heart-breaking anxieties of 1825-26
were ignored, if not forgotten, in the political excitement of 1827.[73]

[Pageheading: _ECONOMIC REFORM._]

The budgets of 1823-26 indeed mark a memorable advance in financial
reform, which the commercial panic of 1825 scarcely interrupted. There
had been a reduction of the national debt by about L25,000,000. "The
poorer householders had been relieved from the pressure both of house
tax and window tax. The manufacturing classes had been encouraged by
the reduction of the duties on silk, wool, and iron. The consuming
classes had been benefited by the reduction of duties on spirits, wines,
coffee, and sugar."[74] Owing to Huskisson's enlightened policy the old
navigation laws had been repealed upon the condition of reciprocity; the
combination laws had been liberally revised; various bounties had been
abandoned on free trade principles, and the monstrous evils of smuggling
had been greatly abated. If the chancellor of the exchequer could show
no surplus in 1826, he could at least boast that after so desperate a
crisis t