The Industrial and Commercial History of England; (Lectures Delivered to the University of Oxford) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF CREDIT AGENCIES. Antiquity of Credit Agencies and Commercial Law?Effect of credit on wealth and prices?The career of the South Sea Scheme?The South American craze of 1825?The railway mania of 1847?The rise in agricultural rents, 1860-70?Causes and duration of inflations and panics. When! addressed an audience last year in this hall, I dealt among other subjects with paper currencies, and I strove to give a general and exact account of the process by which banking was carried on in remote and in recent times. Now a banker is a credit agent, the most important and significant of agents in transactions involving credit. His calling requires him to exhibit two qualities, caution and integrity. The development of the former is a very long and arduous business, though time and attention have enabled the banker to guide his method by a few principles. They were stated, I believe, for the first time, with frank, and almost amusing simplicity, by the late Mr. Gilbert Bankers are exceedingly tolerant of theory. Some of them have been conspicuous and influential theorists, and the disputes among them about the principles of their craft have been prolonged, acute, and highly controversial. The school of Lord Overstone, Mr. Norman, and Col. Torrens is entirely opposed to that of Mr. Tooke andMr. Newmarch. The reasonings of the former satisfied Sir Robert Peel, and were accepted in the Act of 1844. But there are economists, and I enrol myself in the number, who accept, like Cato, the opinions of the vanquished party. I know nothing in the whole range of monetary science so acute and so conclusive as the arguments of Mr. Tooke are, none which were more speedily confirmed by facts. But Mr. Tooke was a careful student of evidence, and though a study of evidence will...