addition of the bank-note currency, is comparatively nothing when weighed against the true and real exchangeable wealth of Great Britain; wealth of which this coined and convertible paper-money is merely the standard sign of value, the recognised medium by which all things are bartered.  It is easy to give one or two significant and startling illustrations of this fact—­significant and startling in other respects than in enabling us to see pretty clearly through the currency-cobwebs industriously woven from time to time amongst us.  All the money in the three kingdoms, the whole circulating medium of the realm—­gold, silver, copper, paper—­does not certainly exceed, if it reaches, which is very doubtful, the national revenue for one year, to say nothing of local rates and burdens!  And it would, moreover, require all the money circulating in Great Britain and Ireland, including notes to the last farthing, to pay for the spirits, beer, and tobacco consumed annually by the people of the United Kingdom!  The note-issues of the Bank of England are about L.19,000,000; its reserve in gold and silver, as we have seen, is upwards of L.14,000,000 sterling:  these amounts added together would no more than about discharge the alcohol and weed score of the country for little more than seven months!  Lightning-flashes these, that throw vivid gleams over the industrial activity, resources, powers, plague-spots of this mighty, restless, enterprising, but far from sufficiently instructed or disciplined British people.

But let us enter the great money-temple.  Very imposing to me has always appeared the army of clerks seated in saturnine silence at the desks, or gliding with grave celerity about the place, and variously employed in balancing enormous accounts, shovelling up heaps of sovereigns, receiving and distributing bank-paper of vast value as coolly and unconcernedly as if engaged in counting out so many chestnuts.  A strange feeling must, I suspect, perturb the mind of a newly-appointed clerk amidst all that astounding wealth, until the genius of the place has so moulded his thoughts and perceptions, that he has come to regard himself as but one of the dumb and dead parts of a mighty machine, over whose action he has no more control than he has over the courses of the stars.  All these issue, cheque, gold, bullion departments, with their numerous busy officials, are in truth but the husk and body of the establishment.  They by whose will and breath it is animated and directed are nowhere at this hour to be seen.  They met on this as on every other morning in their hall of inquisition—­the Bank parlour—­and decided there, without appeal, without reasons assigned, in the absence of the parties whose commercial reputation was trembling in the balance, upon the course of financial action to be pursued, and upon whose paper should or should not be discounted.  A terrible stroke, sharper than a dagger could inflict, politely, blandly as it is performed, is that which falls upon a merchant