The Industrial Revolution

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1027928145

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-159926

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Cunningham, William http://d-nb.info/gnd/128907487

Title:: The Industrial Revolution

Place of publication:: Cambridge

Publisher:: The University Press

Year of publication:: 1922

Scope:: xxii S., S. 404-886

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

A.D. 1689 —1776. was fol- lowed by a re81S which the Bank failed to minimise. The conditions of issuing convertible paver 452 PARLIAMENTARY COLBERTISM merchants was gazetted, and the results were felt imme- diately all over the country. The bankers in Newcastle made a gallant but ineffective struggle. It is said that of the four hundred country banks in England at that time no fewer than one hundred failed, while many others only succeeded in weathering the storm with the greatest diffi- culty. The banks in Exeter and the West of England escaped most easily, but the wave of disaster spread over the North and the panic extended to Glasgow. There was a total destruction of credit, and substantial houses were in imminent danger of failure. It is not perhaps possible to say that this disaster could have been prevented, but it has been generally maintained that the directors of the Bank of fngland acted with undue precipitancy; the suddenness of their refusal to allow the usual accommodation, gave a shock to credit, which would have been much less severe if their action had been more gradual. Besides this, the extra- ordinary over-issues of paper in France were causing a flow of gold to this country; the exchanges were favourable, and under these circumstances the directors, especially after the experience of 1782, need not have been so uncompromising in their attitude and so timorous for the safety of the bank?. Government did much to relieve the tension by issuing Exchequer Bills®. Other errors arose from a failure to understand how important it was that paper-money should be really con- vertible, and to see that a bank could only be carried on when it had wealth in a form which could be promptly realised and used for meeting its engagements. This had been the fundamental error in Chamberlayne’ abortive scheme of the Land Bank. The public knew better than the projectors 1 Macleod, 1. 510. } Sir F. Baring’s evidence before the Bullion Committee. Macleod, 1. 510. 3 7b. m. 216. See p. 441 above. | The promoters had also made extraordinary blunders in calculating the value of landed property. They held that land which a man was entitled to for a hundred years was worth a hundred times the rent, and not something like twenty years’ purchase, or twenty times the rent. They thus calculated the land, not at its present value to the purchaser, but at the accumulated value which would accrue by setting aside the rent annually for a century. The prospective savings from land a century hence are not the same as the worth of the land now, out the present worth of the land is the only satisfactory security as a basis 1 raising credit now, Dr Chamberlavne’s project had been approved by the

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