from which nothing less than utter ruin was anticipated-has been a vast increase in the silk manufacture, which supports upwards of thirty thousand laborers, and is worth to the country upwards of ten millions sterling a-year. Birmingham was called by Mr. Burke the 'toy-shop of Europe;' but among the toys are vast numbers of guns and swords, and now steamengines, more important than all the other fire arms in the world. So extensive is the button trade alone, that in 1834 a single manufacturer had in his workshop 10,000 double sets of cut steel dies for livery buttons only. In 1824, a manufacturer of another kind received a single order for £500 worth of dolls' eyes. At present, about 160 tons of fine sheet steel are annually manufactured into 300,000,000 pens. The whole annual value of all sorts of wrought brass and iron, and of hardware and cutlery articles produced in Great Britain, is estimated at seventeen millions sterling. The manufacture of leather is very nearly equal in value to that of iron, being estimated at sixteen millions. The earthenware manufacture owed to Mr. Wedgwood its increase from a paltry business, in 1762, to one yielding at present from two to three millions a-year. The duties on glass were repealed in 1845, and the advantages anticipated are now in a fair way of being realised. Mr. M'Culloch's section relating to paper, books, &c. is unaccountably deficient in the most ordinary information. He does not seem to be aware that there is such a thing as a cheap press in the country. He computes the value of monthly and quarterly periodicals circulating from fifteen hundred to two thousand copies, but entirely omits those that scatter abroad among the people their weekly sheets, to the number of eighty or a hundred thousand copies! On this point we speak neither for ourselves, nor for many other and more successful laborers in the field of popular instruction, but for the sake of truth, on a not uninteresting subject of social concern. We are unwilling, however, to do anything more than point out a defect which the author has it in his power to remedy in a subsequent edition. Breweries, distilleries, manufactories of hats, soap, candles, &c. make up the account of the wonderful industry of this wonderful country. UNWHOLESOME HOUSES.-It is proved that, besides the waste of money, health, and life, incurred by the system now usually pursued in erecting the lower classes of dwellings in great towns, where comfort, cleanliness, and decency are either not thought of at all, or are sacrificed to a short-sighted greediness of gain, there is also an incalculable amount of demoralization attributable to the same causes; and that, to say the least, an effectual bar is thereby put to the intellectual, moral, and religious improvement of this large portion of the community.-Letters of the Rev. C. Girdlestone. THE BANK OF SCOTLAND. From Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, August, 1848. Having presented an abrégé of Mr. Francis' history of the Bank of England, it has occurred to us that a few notes regarding the history of the Bank of Scotland might very properly follow. In banking, Scotland enjoys some reputation, because it is a business which she has conducted with remarkable prudence and success. It may therefore gratify more than a local curiosity to learn the particulars of the early career of the first national establishment of this kind. We can pretend to few extraordinary means of gratifying such a curiosity; but we chance to possess a rare pamphlet, in which the affairs of the Bank of Scotland for the first thirty years are traced, and from this we may cull some passages likely to be read with interest. The pamphlet (our copy wants the title) appears to have been published in 1727, with the immediate view of supporting the establishment against a rival then set up under the appellation of the Royal Bank of Scotland. It is probably partial in its views, and upon this we have no check; but perhaps the fact is not of much importance. According to our anonymous author, the Bank has obtained a very universal and good reputation among all ranks, though the nation in general knows little about it, except the bare name, and that the Company lends money, and has public notes running, which are paid on demand.' This is a modest enough statement, which we can to some extent avouch, for we lately had in our possession an original letter written by James Drummond of Blair Drummond, May 26, 1720, to Mr. David Drummond, treasurer of the Bank, in which the following passage occurs:— 'I'm heartily glad the Bank holds out so well. Ther's great pains taken in the countrey to raise evill reports upon it. I had occasion to find so in a pretty numerous company the other day; yet I did not find any willing to part with your notes at the least discount. As to the comparative notoriety of the establishment, we can fully believe the remark. It seems to have been long before the full uses of a bank were recognized in Scotland. As an illustration: in November, 1707, John Strachan of Craigcrook was robbed of one thousand pounds sterling in coin, which he kept in a chest in his study, within his lodging in Edinburgh. This seems to show that for some years after the Bank was established, gentlemen continued to keep large sums of money in their own houses, instead of banking it. The Bank of Scotland is usually said to have been established by William Paterson, the Scotchman who projected the Bank of England. But whatever may have been Paterson's secret concern in the matter, our author takes no notice of it, but distinctly says that 'the Bank was first projected at London by an English gentleman, John Holland, with whom,' he adds, eleven other Scots gentlemen, some residing at Edinburgh, and some at London, did join.' They procured in July, 1695, an act of the Scotch parliament organizing the Bank. The stock, now £1,000,000 sterling (generally bearing a premium of about sixtythree per cent.), was originally £100,000; which, however, was described with the grandeur of the Scotch denomination as £1,200,000. The £800,000 Scots set aside for parties residing in Scotland was subscribed for in the course of the months of November and December, the Marquis of Tweedale, his Majesty's High Commissioner to that parliament, and Lord Chancellor at the time, and his son my Lord Yester, being the first subscribers.' The remaining third of the stock was subscribed in London in one day, a great part being taken by Scotchmen residing there. The first arrangement of officials gave the half of the direction and the appointment of governor to the English adventurers; but in a few years, when the number of English shareholders sank below thirteen, this was necessarily changed; and from that time the Bank was wholly in the management of natives. The history of Scotland having been up to this time a tissue of warlike incident and religious contention, it is interesting now to trace the first dawnings of the commercial spirit, and to observe the smallness of the transactions which our people could then compass. Only one-tenth of the stock being paid in, it is actually a fact that the first bank in Scotland commenced business with no more than £10,000! After twenty-six years, we find that only another tenth of the stock had been paid, making the active capital but £20,000. The Bank set up in no imposing edifice, such as those which now adorn the streets of modern Edinburgh and Glasgow, but in a flat, or floor of a house, in the Parliament Square, from which, unluckily, they were burnt out in 1700, but without any loss besides the furniture. The directors met some trouble soon after starting from an attempt at rivalry by the African Company, during which it was found necessary to call up the second £10,000 from the shareholders; but this was soon overpast, and the extra capital returned as superfluous. The Bank issued £100, £50, £20, £10, and £5 notes, which got into such good circulation, that the directors were encouraged to lend money freely on various kinds of security, heritable and movable. They also commenced an exchange trade. To support this, and favour the circulation of their notes, they opened branches at Glasgow, Aberdeen, Montrose, and Dundee; but this turned out ill, the expense far exceeding the advantage and conveniency arising therefrom: for though the Company would willingly have been at some moderate charge to keep them up, if they could thereby have effectuated an answerable circulation of bank-notes about these places for accommodating the lieges in their affairs, yet they found that those offices did contribute to neither of those ends; for the money that was once lodged at any of those places, by the cashiers issuing bills payable at Edinburgh, could not be redrawn thence by bills from Edinburgh so the directors were obliged to give up those offices (after having been at considerable charges in the experiment), and to bring their money to Edinburgh by horse-carriage. We find it stated by Dr. Cleland that this attempt was made in Glasgow in 1696, and abandoned in the ensuing year. He says it was renewed in 1731, but again given up in 1733, for the same reason of want of business. It was not till 1749 that banking fairly took root in the commercial emporium of the west.* One-pound notes, an article which has since been remarkably naturalized in Scotland, were first issued by the Bank of Scotland in January, 1699. The anonymous historian of the Bank says, they are found to be very convenient, not only in the country, but also in the city of Edinburgh, though there is scarce any hopes that they can obtain a currency, to any considerable value, in our public markets and fairs, as some have thought, for nothing answers there among the common people but silver money, even gold being little known among them.' This passage will amuse those who reflect on the now inveterate attachment of Scotland to one-pound notes; a cause in which Sir Walter Scott had almost made her draw the claymore in 1826, and which would even now be a stumbling-block in any general measure for making our currency more metallic. The allusion to the prevalence of silver money in the seventeenth century shows the sense of the general term for money still used in Scotland-siller. In 1704, there was a scarcity of cash all over the kingdom, and a rumour arose that the privy-council designed by proclamation to raise the value of the several current species.' This caused a run of twenty days' continuance on the Bank, which at length, being exhausted of cash, was obliged to stop payment. At the request of the directors, the privy-council inquired into the state of its affairs, which being found satisfactory, a memorial was published, by which public confidence was restored. The Bank made all easy by announcing its design to allow interest on its notes until they should be called in for payment. It was at this crisis that the second £10,000 was permanently raised from the shareholders. In the midst of the trouble, a teller named Pringle was detected as having embezzled £425 10s.; no small loss, considering the diminutive capital of the Company, and that its affairs were then in the hands of creditors.† When it became necessary at the Union to draw in the Scottish coin, and replace it with British, the Bank of Scotland undertook the business, and accomplished it without fee or reward. The directors expected some favour in consequence from the government; but owing to the confusion following on the death of Queen Anne, no actual recognition of their service had been rendered by the government up to the time when our author wrote. It is curious, in our cool and regular times, to look back on the somewhat romantic troubles to which banking was exposed in the days of a disputed succession. The Pretender' appeared with a fleet off the mouth of the Firth of Fourth in March, 1708, when the Bank of Scotland had a large sum lying in ingots in the Mint at Edinburgh, besides a considerable sum in its own office, being coin brought in to be recoined; 'all of which could not well have been carried off or concealed.' But fortunately the dreaded expedition did not land. A similar danger arose at the breaking out of the rebellion of 1715. A run then taking place, and the directors having paid out all the specie of their own which they had in hand, it was found necessary, *New Statistical Account of Scotland, vi. 220. + Maclaurin's Criminal Cases, p. 20. on the 19th September, to stop payment, and order the notes to bear interest from that date. About £30,000 of public money, which they had in charge, was at the same time deposited for safety in the castle of Edinburgh. At the conclusion of the insurrection next spring, these notes were called in, and business recommenced with its usual regularity. It would appear that these temporary suspensions were justly estimated by the public, and that the credit of the Bank was in no degree seriously injured by them. In fact the Bank of Scotland was now in something like the repute of a well-dowered lass-apt to be a little troubled by the impetuosity of her wooers. A company of adventurers had advanced £250,000 in the way of a stock, to be employed for the benefit of Scotland, as an equivalent for the share she took at the Union in the taxes occasioned by the national debt of England. These gentlemen, not content with the four per cent. which they were allowed on their debentures, wished to draw banking profits from their stock; and for this purpose they proposed a union with the Bank of Scotland, on a footing which would have been something like the result of the intrusion of a cuckoo into a sparrow's nest. The Bank, like a modest, judicious young lady, gave a civil refusal to the over-ardent addresses of the 'equivalent;' at which the suitor became very sulky. No sooner was this negotiation at an end, than a similar one came upon the tapis. A mutual-assurance society against losses by fire had been formed in Edinburgh, under the name of the Friendly Society, and as it met with good encouragement, it was immediately rivalled by a company professing the same objects, but contemplating a profit to themselves from the business. This latter body, styling themselves the Edinburgh Society, did not meet with success, and they therefore turned their thoughts to banking. They soon let it be understood that they must either be received into the Bank of Scotland, or they would do what was in their power to ruin it. Being disregarded, they collected notes of the Bank to the amount of £8,400, and taking an opportunity when the South Sea Scheme had drawn much specie away from Scotland, brought those all at once forward for payment. One cannot but smile at the expectations founded on a sum which must now represent so trifling a part of the daily business of the establishment. The plan failed, and there was no run in consequence. The disappointed Society was so mean, after all, as to offer a union of stocks, which was civilly declined. A few months afterwards it perished ignominiously, amidst the many other bubbles of the South Sea period. Soon after, a similar proposal came from the Royal Exchange Assurance Company, and was dealt with in like manner. The clamours of these various courtships are, however, proof that many men felt themselves and their capital to be unjustly excluded from a share of the banking business of Scotland. It was not to be expected that the whole of that business could be long conducted upon twenty or thirty thousand pounds, with the possessors of other thousands standing round, all anxious to be at work in the same field. Accordingly, in 1727, a determined effort was made by the shareholders of the equivalent' to obtain the necessary sanction of the government for setting up a |