’The sixteen years which followed the last charter of the bank have been pregnant with important events of a financial character; the most important, perhaps, during the whole history of the institution.  The bank has twice, during this short period, been on the brink of suspension, and was relieved only by the interference of Government.  The second instance occurred after new gold, to the extent of one hundred millions sterling, or more, had been poured into Western Europe from California and Australia.  The Bank of France had, during the same period, suspended specie payment.  Two financial revulsions have occurred in the United States, when, with few exceptions, the banks of the whole country suspended specie payments.  The production of gold and silver throughout the world, which, up to 1844, was annually about ten or twelve millions sterling, had recently advanced from twenty-five to thirty millions sterling per annum, thus stimulating industry and production largely throughout Europe and America.  Sir Robert Peel, the author of the new charter of the bank, has left the world’s stage, after witnessing the failure of the charter to fully accomplish the end promised; Europe and America, Asia and Europe, have been knit together by a wire cord, and capital is now subscribed to

         ‘Put a girdle round about the earth,’

whereby London may speak to San Francisco (the prospective commercial centre of the world) in less than ‘forty minutes.’  During the same short space of sixteen years the suspended States of this Union (five at least) have resumed payment of their obligations; two violent wars, with sundry revolutions, have occurred in Europe; the ancient city of the Cortez has been conquered by the ‘hordes of the North,’ and magnanimously given up by the captors to the possession of their weaker enemy, and millions were paid to the latter for portions of their territory; the northwest passage of the American continent has been discovered; steam has accomplished wonders between Europe and America, and between Europe and their distant colonies of Asia, Africa, and Australia; Ireland has been on the verge of starvation,[6] when 600,000 of her people died from hunger alone and its effects, and her population was reduced two millions by emigration and privation; England’s minister has been expelled from the capital of the United States; speculation has been rife in Europe and America, and its inevitable effects, revulsion and bankruptcy, have followed in its train; the railway and the telegraph have brought remote regions together; China, with her four hundred millions of people, has been conquered by the united forces of the English and the French.

’The Bank of England, instead of pursuing one even course, with a view to permanent commercial interests, has unfortunately, and, we fear, from selfish and individual views, fostered speculation by reducing her rate of discount to 2 per cent.,