(he says) make restitution of the thing stolen, or its moneyvalue, a part of the sentence. This principle might be usefully adopted in all cases of loss by theft or fraud.' It has been enforced ever since 1803 by the codes of Austria, Sardinia, and Baden; and, it seems, with excellent results. Let the English thief too be made to know that, besides the punishment due to the moral offence as expiatory, he must bear the burden of reparation also. In France the thief generally buries his stolen money, and, if convicted and sent to prison, returns after a few years to his treasure, increased by his earnings during detention. With us the receiver of stolen goods makes over his spoil to relatives, who are often rich; and thus escaping forfeiture, it is remitted to him after he had been transported-at once converting the convict into the Australian capitalist. Civil restitution is perfectly feasible in all this class of criminals. In others of less capital, either the guilty person will disgorge, or, if he have spent the money, his friends will come forward to his aid.* The seeming injustice of thus mulcting innocent connexions is to be met by its not being compulsory, and by the right it gives the reliever to control the man in future. The absolute insolvent, who cannot otherwise repair the loss occasioned by his depredations, should do so by the sweat of his brow. Until he has done that, he can have no right to consider his labour as his own.

Education has now most wisely been viewed in connexion with its bearings on crime. We have seen what it does for the convict of Pentonville. A wise system would not only furnish principles of conduct, but hold out some assured prizes for which all could contend (and all bettered for the conflict), and which some would attain. Our forefathers understood this: their foundations and grammar-schools carried the boy into manhood, and furnished him with the prospect of a competence. These have, from the rise in the value of property, attracted the cupidity of the richer classes, who have in too many cases usurped the advantages meant for their humble brethren. Our parish schools, excellent though they be, give no such hope as lighted up the vista of a life from youth to old age in our monastic institutions. The charity-boy must shift for himself—he may or may not succeed in the scramble of life-but there is no hand to help him on but his own. A broader charity is wanted-a charity founded not in the despairs but in the hopes of our nature-which will cheer the heart in the heat and struggle of the battle, and will not wait to open for disappointment and decrepitude the asylum

* A very large annual surplus is left, after paying all the expenses of our recruiting department, from moneys raised by the poor relations of soldiers for the purchase of their relatives' discharge.

and

and the almshouse. Among our liberties give these the Liberty of Hoping. Can there be no un-penal Parkhurst for the offspring of Honest Poverty? Is that splendid institution to be the appanage only of the vicious? You have begun to provide for your soldiers in your colonies, and the view of the few thus cared for animates and strengthens the whole class. Extend the principle to the poorer classes generally, and a very few prizes thus offered to those who will qualify for it may do more to popularise education than any mechanism of Bell or Lancaster.

ART. IX. The present State of the Currency practically considered. London, pp. 76. 1847.

THIS pamphlet contains a reprint of Articles (some of them

very ably written) on the monetary controversies arising out of our still continued commercial distress, which have appeared in the Morning Post, the Morning Chronicle, and the Standard. We might also have placed at the head of our paper the titles of some dozens of new pamphlets on the same topicsembracing as many different views of them. These discussions seem to leave the contest as hot as ever. We have so lately taken our own share in it that we may be excused for not entering into the thick of the battle again just as yet. But it has occurred to us that we might perhaps contribute an acceptable service by throwing together a few remarks on a branch of the subject, which, though of the most vital importance to the general issue, has appeared to us to be very much neglected in most of the disquisitions which have fallen under our observation; we allude to that circle of causes which, under all systems and in all states of the currency, is for ever at work to disturb from time to time the even tenor of commercial credit and adventure, and from the operation of which, in producing occasional monetary crises of greater or less intensity, we can scarcely hope that any legislative precautions will ever entirely protect us.

Every one who has considered the subject will be aware, that when the world, or a nation, or an individual, engaged during any period in production, has replaced what has been consumed, and restored what has been dilapidated during the production, and has beyond this produced more, the world, the nation, or the individual, has created what may (in a phrase universally understood) be called fresh capital. We will take the simplest illustration which occurs to us. A man lives by

the

the cultivation of land; he cultivates it by the hands of himself and his own family. At the end of the year he has met his engagements, fed himself and his family,-nothing remains, and he starts again. But the next year he is more successful. At the end of that year, after having performed all that is above enumerated, he finds himself still in possession of beef, pork, and bread, and beer and cheese. He has created fresh capital, and is, of course, anxious to invest it productively. Having determined in what way he will improve his land or premises, he will probably send for labourers, and he will feed them on these accumulated stores while they are making the improvement. When the stores are consumed, then his capital will be invested. Let us suppose the third year to be like the first,-no surplus; then he has no capital to invest. He must wait for a successful year and a fresh creation of capital before he invests again. The rule for the nation or the world is the same as for the individual. On this simple principle hangs what we call popularly the value of money. If any one of the three parties attempts to invest more than the fresh capital created, he involves himself in struggles and difficulties; if less, then he gets for his fresh capital no returns.

This creation of fresh capital is constantly in progress in Great Britain, though with varying rapidity. It has transformed the country from a wilderness into a garden, and has performed other things, to which we may advert in the progress of our argument. Practically, we treat the created capital as money seeking investment; and indeed a portion of it will generally exist in the shape of the precious metals. Between 1840 and 1845 ten millions of the fresh capital reached England in the shape of bullion, uselessly as it might then appear to us, but most providentially considering the subsequent course of events. The remainder of the created capital exists in the shape of goods, which are represented by credits, capable of being used as money, and which confer the power of regulating the direction of this created and uninvested capital.

We will, for simplicity, treat these accumulations as money seeking investment; and we wish to direct the attention of our readers to the separate instincts of the two great classes who have in this country the power of directing the investment of this unemployed money.. We shall then have laid grounds which will enable us to show how simple, normal, and intelligible has been, in the main, the progress of each of our own monetary crises since the year 1815. We are stern bullionists. We say that a pound is 23 grains and a fraction of standard gold, and ought always (as far as such creatures as we are qualified to say always) to be so. We have selected this date, because, while

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. Το have the Bank of England, with its unbounded and mysterious

VOL. LXXXII. NO. CLXIII. P

wealth,