political horizon; but even the existence of that opposition, in defiance of the excellent custom of the University, is a sign of evil omen, because, so far as it goes, it exhibits the overbearing tyranny of democratic passions, in the very class amongst whom they should be most restrained. The admixture of religious excitement does not diminish, but, on the contrary, aggravates the danger of this unqualified working of the democratic principle; and if the rectors and curates who are now about to travel from so many parts of England, in order to punish their representative for not being a delegate, shall accomplish that object, they may find hereafter, when the system which they are sanctioning has gradually driven from public life every man combining nice personal honour with real political capacity, and has entrusted all power to honest dulness and unscrupulous ability, that they have been accelerating the approach of a time, when the votes and wishes of clergymen will have as little weight in England as amongst the millions of the English race in North America, who, in politics, exact from the ministers of religion nearly the same passive submission that is expected from women and from negroes. London, July 8, 1852. PART I. DANGERS. "Take heed and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." LUKE xii. 15. MONEY AND MORALS. CHAPTER I. THE PROBlem. "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour; "How will the gold get into the currency?" is, just now, a question of considerable interest. It involves a good deal more than it appears to do at first sight. There is evidently some difficulty in the process. The old notion was, that new gold had only to appear in a country, and straightway it became currency, raising prices and producing other remarkable changes. Mr. Tooke, in his pamphlet of 1844, showed that old notion to be wrong; but he still never thought of denying that new gold might, and under some circumstances must, get into the currency, and make its appearance, whether as cause or effect, along with increased prices. This happened on a great scale in the sixteenth century, and, of course, might happen again; but the precise manner in which such a thing could happen has not been elucidated, nor any attempt made to show that a process which was easy in this country in the sixteenth century, when gold and silver were the whole of her money, is equally easy or even practicable in the nineteenth, when exchanges a hundred-fold greater are affected by a credit system so perfect, that, for some twenty years, England was able to part with nearly all her gold, and to enjoy very high prosperity B in its absence. It is plain just now that there is a hitch somewhere. We imagine it to be a sort of necessity that this gold, of which we have already so much, and of which so much more is yet to come, must find its way into the currency; that prices must, sooner or later, be doubled; that fundholders will have to lay down their carriages; and that Birmingham will attain the summit of human felicity; but however these things are to come to pass, it is certain that they will not come to pass either easily or very soon. For, first, we have the gold, and it does not go into circulation. We have no exact knowledge of the number of sovereigns in circulation in England, but we do know the number of one-pound notes in Scotland, which the people of that country, by a peculiar taste, prefer to the sovereign, though to the eye and to the touch of the English visitor, they are less agreeable than the bullion. Now, as the one-pound note circulation of Scotland does not materially increase, it seems fair to infer that the sovereign circulation of England, which must be subject to very similar influences, has suffered no important alteration. At all events, twenty millions in the Bank is a good round sum, full one-half of it being of no sort of use there. Why does it not move out, and make a beginning of those rising prices? It does not move out, and one may say does not show any tendency to do so. This, then, is a curious question. Our circumstances are wholly different from those which, in the end of the last century, depreciated in France the paper currency of assignats. The precise steps of that change have yet to be traced by careful historians; but even if they were known to us, they would only suggest, by a highly-foreshortened representation, that long perspective of deeper and more dangerous change which must be involved in any considerable depreciation of our own currency. This, then, would be a curious question, merely as a matter of scientific interest; and in this light it appeared to the present writer in the year 1847, when it suggested itself as a problem to be solved, in connection with certain conflicting theories of Bank management, and more faintly in 1844 as a |