in different parts of one spacious hall.  The persons employed by the bank were originally only fifty-four.  They are now nine hundred.  The sum paid yearly in salaries amounted at first to only four thousand three hundred and fifty pounds.  It now exceeds two hundred and ten thousand pounds.  We may therefore fairly infer that the incomes of commercial clerks are, on an average, about three times as large in the reign of Victoria as they were in the reign of William the Third.525

It soon appeared that Montague had, by skilfully availing himself of the financial difficulties of the country, rendered an inestimable service to his party.  During several 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.