There were, indeed, some hammered pieces which had escaped mutilation; and sixpences not clipped within the innermost ring were still current.  This old money and the new money together made up a scanty stock of silver, which, with the help of gold, was to carry the nation through the summer.697 The manufacturers generally contrived, though with extreme difficulty, to pay their workmen in coin.698 The upper classes seem to have lived to a great extent on credit.  Even an opulent man seldom had the means of discharging the weekly bills of his baker and butcher.699 A promissory note, however, subscribed by such a man, was readily taken in the district where his means and character were well known.  The notes of the wealthy moneychangers of Lombard Street circulated widely.700 The paper of the Bank of England did much service, and would have done more, but for the unhappy error into which the Parliament had recently been led by Harley and Foley.  The confidence which the public had felt in that powerful and opulent Company had been shaken by the Act which established the Land Bank.  It might well be doubted whether there would be room for the two rival institutions; and of the two, the younger seemed to be the favourite of the government and of the legislature.  The stock of the Bank of England had gone rapidly down from a hundred and ten to eighty-three.  Meanwhile the goldsmiths, who had from the first been hostile to that great corporation, were plotting against it.  They collected its paper from every quarter; and on the fourth of May, when the Exchequer had just swallowed up most of the old money, and when scarcely any of the new money had been issued, they flocked to Grocers’ Hall, and insisted on immediate payment.  A single goldsmith demanded thirty thousand pounds.  The Directors, in this extremity, acted wisely and firmly.  They refused to cash the notes which had been thus maliciously presented, and left the holders to seek a remedy in Westminster Hall.  Other creditors, who came in good faith to ask for their due, were paid.  The conspirators affected to triumph over the powerful body, which they hated and dreaded.  The bank which had recently begun to exist under such splendid auspices, which had seemed destined to make a revolution in commerce and in finance, which had been the boast of London and the envy of Amsterdam, was already insolvent, ruined, dishonoured.  Wretched pasquinades were published, the Trial of the Land Bank for murdering the Bank of England, the last Will and Testament of the Bank of England, the Epitaph of the Bank of England, the Inquest on the Bank of England.  But, in spite of all this clamour and all this wit, the correspondents of the States General reported, that the Bank of England had not really suffered in the public esteem, and that the conduct of the goldsmiths was generally condemned.701