In addition to the stoppage of the banking firm of Hector and Co., of Petersfield, letters have been received in town announcing further failures in Manchester and Liverpool. Gloom and want of confidence are on the increase. The banking-house of Hopkins, Druid, and Co., of Arundel, has also been compelled to suspend payments.
In these alarming times of monetary pressure and commercial distress, the fluctuations or contractions and expansions that have taken place to the currency necessarily demand attention and inquiry. We have frequently traced back the serious contractions in the currency to the stringent operations which the Bank of England was compelled to adopt in self-defence, after the abstraction of £7,000,000 of gold from her coffers in a few months of the year 1839, to pay for food to the people after the bad harvest of 1838, whereby the gold in the Bank coffers was pulled down from £9,600,000 in December, 1838, to £2,500,000 in August of 1839. We have shown repeatedly, by facts and figures, that from that time to the present the Bank has been labouring hard, and that with all her appliances of the screw the directors have never got so much over £5,000,000 of specie in their coffers since that time, and at the present the stock of bullion does nut exceed £4,500,000, while it is threatened with a spring drain to pay for further importations. The circulation of the Bank drooped from £20,249,409, in July, 1838, to £15,823,000, in December, 1839; and in December 1840 it stood at £15,714,200, while the bullion at the last named period was only £3,942,000. These are clear results from plain causes.