it gives us a sufficiently long period for illustration, it does avoid any doubt or question about depreciation, and it also avoids any period of active war expenditure. We are perfectly aware that panics and crises, with their usual accompaniments, took place before 1815, and would under any standard. But we think we have enough for our purpose.

We will take first the manufacturing and mercantile classes: adverting shortly to the circumstances which give somewhat of a varied direction to the investment of their respective accumulations.

The manufacturer who finds at the end of the year a larger balance at his banker's than is necessary for conducting his business at its present extent, obeys a very natural and a very reasonable impulse when he employs the surplus in increasing his business. He keeps his capital under his own eye and control, and the existence of the surplus proves that the state of the trade in which it has accumulated justifies the application. By this process the half-dozen spinning-jennies, first collected in a loft by Arkwright, have expanded into the fifteen hundred cottonfactories which now exist within thirty miles of the Exchange at Manchester. So you are building another cotton mill!' They build one another,' was the reply of an old and successful spinner. Extraneous capital has only gone into the cotton manufacture on the legitimately acquired and generally well-vindicated credit of those who created the trade and have carried it on, and has been applied under their guidance. So universally has this been the case that we believe that in almost every instance in which unconnected parties have, under the idea of large profits, thrust themselves and their money into that business, they have pretty speedily retired, leaving their money behind them. In early life we were acquainted with a gentleman who at fortyfive retired from the wine-trade, having realized a fortune of thirty thousand pounds. He unfortunately visited Manchester, and on the Exchange there he could not cast his eyes on any side without their lighting on men who had been themselves operatives, or at most were only removed from that class by one generation, who were still in the vigour of mercantile life, and who were reputed to be worth eighty, one hundred, two hundred thousand pounds. He determined to be a manufacturer. He built a mill in the most approved form, and filled it with new machinery. In twelve years the mill stood for want of cotton; the broker and the banker were inexorable. Like Jeames de la Pluche, our friend was the 'soul of honour' the relics of 30,0007. paid to his creditors fourteen shillings in the pound; and he finished his life in a country town as commission agent to a London wine-house.

This is no solitary instance. We bring it forward to exemplify our statement that the manufacturing districts have been covered with their existing enormous amount of fixed capital-mills, warehouses, houses, shops, water and gas works, with a hundred et ceteras mainly by accumulations within the trade to which they administer.

But even these vast undertakings did not exhaust the wealth which was created by the manufacturers. A very large amount of canal property was always held in Manchester and its neighbourhood; a circumstance which we only mention incidentally, to exemplify the disposition of the manufacturing body to fix their accumulations;-of which a further confirmation is found in the singular fact that 35 years ago Wheeler's Chronicle,' the only newspaper then published in Manchester, appeared week after week without any London city article, and without any quotation of the price of stocks. Indeed, it is only since trusts have multiplied with the multiplication of wealth, that the public funds have been known at all generally to the manufacturers of Lancashire and Yorkshire as a mode of investing money. We have taken the largest manufacture in Great Britain as our instance; but we believe that the same statement would be true in respect to every other large branch of our national manufacturing industry.

The accumulations of the purely mercantile and trading class have not merged so immediately in brick, mortar, iron, and timberas those of the manufacturing class. A large portion of them has no doubt gone to create the British mercantile marine; another portion has been expended, at home, in the colonies, and in foreign countries, in creating establishments destined to increase the facilities of British commerce; but a portion has at all times floated on the surface of the money-market, recurring to its owners from time to time by the maturity of the temporary investment, or easily revocable by its realization.

Another class remains, exceedingly varied in its composition, but having this common quality, that they have been rendered by their occupations and habits an unbargaining class. In every pecuniary transaction they feel the suspicion which inexperience renders natural and reasonable. This class includes all professional men, civil, military, and ecclesiastical; all who depend on fixed salaries; those generally whose incomes are realized; trustees; and all those timid and very provident persons who are the modern representatives of the hoarders of a more ignorant and less secure state of society. This class is in the aggregate a vast accumulator. Every quarter-day presents a vast sum seeking interest without trouble and without risk. To have the Bank of England, with its unbounded and mysterious wealth,

VOL. LXXXII. NO. CLXIII.

P

wealth, as a paymaster; to find the private bankers debited in the pass-book at the end of every half-year To Divd. on £5630 Cons £;' to be able to invest through a broker for a small charge, his power of imposition being confined within very narrow limits by quotations in every newspaper; these circumstances satisfy so many feelings, and obviate so many inconveniences, that our investors are reconciled to 3 per cent., and often, for a time at least, to less; for the banks of deposit in England and Scotland, which allow a low rate of interest, are mainly supported by this quiescent class. They are, in fact, merely its agents to bring this mass of money into the general market. Every monetary crisis confirms the propensities, justifies the wisdom, and recruits the numbers of those who, in their investments, make security and ease the first, and profit the second, consideration. Regular, though slow, when others fail, they flourish; they burst on the market with no gluts, but they keep up a constant pressure on the value of money; the silent plodding operation of compound interest is always there.

With respect to accumulations arising from the cultivation of land, it may be enough to say that the cultivator generally follows the same instincts as the manufacturer, and invests his fresh capital in the extension of his own business. But the great variety which exists in the terms on which land is occupied in this country renders this a very complicated subject. We hope to be able to recur to it on some future occasion. Without doubt a general accumulation of money presses up the price of land as much as it does the price of consols; but a simple purchase of either has no effect on the money-market. There is as much money, as much land, and as much consols as before, and whether they belong to A, B, or C, in the order which we have named them respectively, or in any other order in which changes can be rung on these letters, makes no difference to the market of either. When money is laid out on land with the view of making it more valuable, the capital may be profitably fixed, or it may be dissipated. Of the former, we have all known instances; and of the latter, very many. The passion for improving land is universal, and in new proprietors very ardent. Every gentleman who has studied agriculture from the windows of the Hounslow and Bank 'buss, who attends the Christmas show and dinner at Smithfield, applauds the Duke of Richmond's speech, and pays his annual guinea to the Royal Agricultural Society, having bought an estate, thinks himself qualified to improve it. Twenty years ago subdividing all the fields was an improvement; now, throwing down half the fences. But, of all the modes of dissipating capital by applying it to land, an enclosure by Act of Parliament and commissioners is

the

the most simple. Before many of our readers were born, an Act passed for enclosing 14,000 acres of waste land. Of this 7000 acres were filtered through the digestive organs of commissioners, surveyors, clerks, and their satellites. Towards the conclusion of this process, the clerk to the enclosure, one of the most popular as well as most social men we ever knew, stated in the course of a convivial speech, that he was either 46 years old or 64: the figures were the same, and his hearers might take it either way.' He might have added, that he had been both ages in the course of his enclosure clerkship. He was 44 years old when he signed the first advertisement under the commissioners, and he was 66 when he witnessed the signatures of the commissioners to the final award. The commission died off more than once of gout and apoplexy. The unhappy commoners, their heirs and assigns, after having been deprived for 22 years of stockage and other rights of common--after having seen half of their land sold and dissipated in the manner described above-learnt at length, by public advertisement, that a parchment had been deposited with the Clerk of the Peace, on which was delineated and described the modicum of land allotted to every claimant,—and there the matter ended.

Since the peace in 1815 money crises in this country have nearly conformed to a decennial recurrence. The grand exception of 1839 is manifestly referable to a failure of food. The years 1825, 35, and 45, with those immediately following, each have been marked by the same broad features-a glut of money, a wild speculation, scarcity, remorse, and suffering; and the nation starts again on confirmed principles of prudence and caution. One-pound notes have been suppressed; banks having more than six partners legalized; the Bank Charter has been tinkered more than once; banks of issue have been regulated and restrained. Time after time we have been assured that speculation and panics would cease, because the exciting causes of the former and the pabulum of the latter had been put down by act of Parliament. But the course of 1825, recurring in 1835, repeated in 1845, and probably to be repeated again in 1855, holds on its way totally regardless of the quackery which, smothered in returns. and statistics, has wholly passed by the simple principles by which mainly it is governed.

Let us endeavour to trace this course, commencing with the period of prudence and caution to which a panic has brought the country. The engagements of the hot fit have, with whatever pain, been liquidated, compromised, or otherwise closed. From the walks of mercantile and manufacturing industry, two classes have disappeared-those who went too fast, and those who went

too slow-those who without the requisite power and depth aspired to lead, and those who from old habits and connexions were unable to follow-those who flashed into the front, and those who dwindled into the rear. Every one who has seen a large field of horses start in the same race will have observed that those which dash off at a pace which the main body cannot maintain, speedily join in the rear those whose natural rate will not bring them into an average place. The steady, deep, persevering runners carry on the race. As one effect of the crisis just passed, stocks of everything, except the raw produce of the earth in its first shape, are light. Perhaps, nationally, this is its worst effect. Pecuniary difficulties can only be overcome by producing more, whereas the tendency of a crisis is to make the nation produce less. In the mercantile and manufacturing classes the rate of accumulation has been retarded, or, more probably, accumulation has been altogether suspended. But the earth goes on producing. We have heard of many factories which have ceased to produce calico because the hire of money was 8 per cent. per annum. We seldom hear of a field which has ceased to produce wheat for the same reason. Cattle and sheep procreate and rear their young, heedless of the dismay which reigns in Capel Court and Threadneedle Street. Here, then, the foundation is laid; and where peace prevails, and property and person are secure, men will produce, and trade, and accumulate. But, passing by the state of the mercantile and manufacturing classes in this early stage of revival, let us see how it fares with the quiet class of accumulators. We see several things which will accelerate their rate of accumulation-nothing occurs to us which will retard it. Indeed, we are inclined to think that with this class accumulation goes on fastest in times of pecuniary pressure, and slowest in times of abundance. In the first place, when great abundance reigns, large sums always lie idle, as far as the first hand is concerned, yielding him nothing. He, somewhat spurning 3 per cent., has not yet acquired sufficient hardihood to venture on a novel, or more hazardous, or more troublesome security-and leaves his money in the Bank of England, or at his private banker's, by whom a portion of it is cautiously employed at the existing low rate. still more 8, per cent. calls all these sums into use. to time moneys come in which were lent at a low, and go out again at an enhanced, rate of interest. This is a complicated subject. When employment is curtailed, of course accumulation by the working classes must be curtailed also. We are inclined, however, to think that the case of the manufacturing and that of the saving classes generally was pretty accurately summed up the other day by a Manchester gentleman who belongs to both

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