What prevents the banks of Edinburgh to have offices in every trading town in Scotland, where their notes may be regularly paid on presentation, and new credits given as circulation demands them? The only objection I can find to this plan of banking, is the difficulty of finding credit at London to borrow such large sums. This, I think, may also be removed, from the plain principles of credit. If the banks of Edinburgh enter into a fair coalition, as they ought to do, I think, in order to form really a national bank, totally independent of that of England; may they not open a subscription at London, and establish a regular fund of their own, as well as any other company, such as the India, or South Sea? By borrowing in the beginning at a small advance of interest above the funds, and paying as regularly as government does, will not all those who make a trade of buying and selling stock fill their loan, rather than invest it in any other carrying a less interest? And if the whole land securities, and stocks of those banks at Edinburgh be pledged for this loan, will it not stand on as good a bottom as any fund upon earth? And can it be doubted but parliament will encourage such a scheme, upon laying the affairs of Scotland and the banks properly before them? By this means they will really become a national bank: because England seems at present to be to Scotland, what all the rest of the world is to England. Now, the bank of England has no such fund of credit on the continent, that I know; and were that country to fall into as great distress, by a heavy balance, as Scotland has been, she would find as many difficulties in extricating herself by domestic borrowings, bank circulation, &c. as Scotland has found by the like domestic expedients. She would then be obliged, for her relief, to have recourse to a fund opened in Holland, Spain, or Portugal, like to what I propose for Scotland with respect to England. I have heard it alledged, that the whole distress occasioned to the banks and circulation of Scotland, was occasioned by a false step taken by them, some years ago; at the time when the lowness of the English funds, and a prospect of a peace, occasioned great remittances from Scotland, and a withdrawing of the large capital of, perhaps, 500,000 _l._ owing in Scotland to English persons of property. At that time, it is said, the banks imprudently launched out in giving extensive credits to the debtors of those capitals, and to those who wanted to remit the funds they had secured in the hands of people who could not pay them; that this threw a load of paper into circulation, which it could not suspend, being far beyond the extent of it; and that, consequently, the paper came back upon the bank, produced a run for coin, which soon exhausted, in a manner, all that was in Scotland; and that the country has never been able to recover itself since.