form the balance-sheets of the Issue Department and the Banking
Department are shown separately. A copy of the weekly return in both the
old and new forms will be found in _A History of the Bank of England_, p.
290, by A. Andreades (Eng. trans., 1909); see also R. H. I. Palgrave, _Bank
Rate and the Money Market_, p. 297.

One result of the division of the accounts of the bank into two departments
is that, if through any circumstance the Bank of England be called on for a
_larger_ sum in notes or specie than the notes held in its banking
department (technically spoken of as the "Reserve") amount to, permission
has to be obtained from the government to "suspend the Bank Act" in order
to allow the demand to be met, whatever the amount of specie in the "issue
department" may be. Three times since the passing of the Bank Act--during
the crises of 1847, 1857 and 1866--authority has been given for the
suspension of that act. On one of these dates only, in 1857, the limits of
the act were exceeded; on the other two occasions the fact that the
permission had been given stayed the alarm. It should be remembered,
whenever the act of 1844 is criticized, that since it came into force there
has been no anxiety as to payment in specie of the note circulation; but
the division of the specie held into two parts is an arrangement not
without disadvantages. [Sidenote: Bank rate.] Certainly since the act of
1844 became law, the liability to constant fluctuations in the Bank's rate
of discount--one main characteristic of the English money market--has
greatly increased. To charge the responsibility of the increase in the
number of those fluctuations on the Bank Act alone would not be
justifiable, but the working of the act appears to have an influence in
that direction, as the effect of the act is to cut the specie reserve held
by the bank into two parts and to cause the smaller of these parts to
receive the whole strain of any demands either for notes or for specie.
Meanwhile the demands on the English money market are greater and more
continuous than those on any other money market in the world. Of late years
the changes in the bank rate have been frequent, and the fluctuations even
in ordinary years very severe. From the day when the act came into
operation in 1844, to the close of the year 1906, there had been more than
400 changes in the rate. The hopes which Sir Robert Peel expressed in 1844,
that after the act came into force commercia