se of paper, because there were greater facilities for
escaping detection. It was easy to understand that there could not be
so strong an inducement to crime when the currency consisted in notes,
numbered, and signed with a known name, as when it consisted of gold
coin, which it was impossible to identify. Lord Liverpool, however, had
no such fears of highwaymen as the noble earl. He once, when he was a
boy, he said, lost all the money he had in his pockets by a highwayman;
and it was natural that he should be as much alive to this danger as
the noble earl. But still, with all his early associations, he could
not help thinking that if danger must revive with a return to a metallic
currency, it would have been felt during the last four or five years;
for during all that time their lordships had been travelling about,
not with notes, but with sovereigns in their pockets. The almost total
extinction of highway robberies was to be attributed to the only thing
that could check or extinguish them--the establishment of a powerful and
effective police.

While this measure for annihilating the issue of small notes in England
was making its way through parliament, the fitness of its application
to Ireland and Scotland was discussed. In Scotland there was a great
opposition even to the very idea of it. In every city and county public
meetings were held to deprecate the destruction of the one pound and
guinea notes, and men of all ranks and parties joined in one unanimous
outcry against the threatened introduction of gold. During the
discussion on the bill regarding England, indeed, the tables of both
houses were loaded with petitions from Scotland, setting forth the
benefits which that country so long had enjoyed from its banking system,
and the evils which would arise from every attempt to give it a new
and an untried form. Parliament rightly paid respect to the anxiety and
unanimity with which these opinions were expressed, especially as they
came from parties who were acquainted with the nature and practical
effects of the system. Moreover, the difference between the two systems
of the two countries, and the difference between the effects of the
two systems, formed good reasons why parliament should pause before
extending the plan to Scotland. Accordingly select committees were
appointed by both houses to inquire into the state of the circulation of
small notes in Scotland and Ireland, and to report upon the
expediency of alter