England was compelled on and after a certain date to pay gold for its notes on demand.  The bank, anticipating a consequent rush for gold, had collected vast quantities of sovereigns, the new coin; but the rush never came, for a mighty simple reason.  Gold is convenient in small sums, but a burden and a nuisance in large ones.  It betrays its presence and invites robbers; it is a bore to lug it about, and a fearful waste of golden time to count it.  Men run upon gold only when they have reason to distrust paper.  But Mr. Peel’s Bill, instead of damaging Bank of England paper, solidified it, and gave the nation a just and novel confidence in it.  Thus, then, the large hoard of gold, fourteen to twenty millions, that the caution of the bank directors had accumulated in their coffers, remained uncalled for.  But so large an abstraction from the specie of the realm contracted the provincial circulation.  The small business of the country moved in fetters, so low was the metal currency.  The country bankers petitioned government for relief, and government, listening to representations that were no doubt supported by facts, and backed by other interests, tampered with the principle of Mr. Peel’s Bill, and allowed the country bankers to issue 1 pound and 2 pound notes for eleven years to come.

To this step there were but six dissentients in the House of Commons, so little was its importance seen or its consequences foreseen.  This piece of inconsistent legislation removed one restraint, irksome but salutary, from commercial enterprise at a moment when capital was showing some signs of a feverish agitation.  Its immediate consequences were very encouraging to the legislator; the country bankers sowed the land broadcast with their small paper, and this, for the cause above adverted to, took pro tem. the place of gold, and was seldom cashed at all except where silver was wanted.  On this enlargement of the currency the arms of the nation seemed freed, enterprise shot ahead unshackled, and unwonted energy and activity thrilled in the veins of the kingdom.  The rise in the prices of all commodities which followed, inevitable consequence of every increase in the currency, whether real or fictitious, was in itself adverse to the working classes; but the vast and numerous enterprises that were undertaken, some in the country itself, some in foreign parts, to which English workmen were conveyed, raised the price of labor higher still in proportion; so no class was out of the sun.

Men’s faces shone with excitement and hope.  The dormant hordes of misers crept out of their napkins and sepulchral strong-boxes into the warm air of the golden time.  The mason’s chisel chirped all over the kingdom, and the shipbuilders’* hammers rang all round the coast; corn was plenty, money became a drug, labor wealth, and poverty and discontent vanished from the face of the land.  Adventure seemed all wings, and no lumbering carcass to clog it.  New joint-stock companies were started