ion should cease to circulate at the end of three years.
In conclusion, the chancellor of the exchequer moved the following
resolution:--"That it is the opinion of this committee, that all
promissory notes payable to the bearer on demand, issued by licence,
and under the value of five pounds, and stamped previous to the 5th of
February, 1826, be allowed to circulate until February 5th, 1829, and
no longer." Mr. Baring took the lead in opposition to the measure,
objecting to it as being inadequate to meet the evils complained of, and
ill-suited to the present state of the country. He could not agree, he
said, in attributing the existing embarrassments either to speculation
or over-trading: much of it had been owing to the conduct previously
pursued by the Bank. The resolution was likewise opposed by Sir John
Wrottesly, Alderman Thompson, Alderman Heygate, and Mr. Wilson, who were
adverse to it on various grounds: that it would be wholly inoperative to
give any effectual relief; that it would be positively mischievous; and
that the present state of the country required the postponement of such
a measure. The scheme of increasing the number of partners in a bank by
way of security was treated by opposition as visionary, since it was not
on numbers, but on prudence, and their mode of conducting business,
that their credit depended. Sir J. Wrottesly maintained that the country
bankers, instead of exciting the mad spirit of speculation, were the
only persons who had not speculated; and, in reality, were obliged, from
a regard to their own safety, to discourage such a practice on the
part of their customers. He asked, where did this spirit of speculation
commence? It first showed itself in Manchester and Liverpool, where no
local notes circulated. The cotton speculations, in these two places
were the first heard of, and yet in neither of them was a single note
circulated. The next point at which this spirit was manifested, and
at which it had led to its un-happiest results, was not in the country
where the notes in question circulated, but on the stock-exchange of
London. It was further urged by the opponents of the measure that the
very essence of the present pecuniary embarrassments consisted in the
curtailed state of the currency; and that the direct tendency of the
proposed measure was to increase them by limiting it still more. Taking
the currency at twenty millions, it was argued, and the deduction to be
made on account, o