Now, the contraction of the currency to any considerable extent operates, so far as it goes, in just the same way on general credit and the national fortunes. When money becomes scarce, no one can, without difficulty, discharge his obligations, because the banks, who are the reservoirs from which payment of all considerable transactions are drawn, cannot afford the usual accommodation. Those who are not in first-rate credit can get nothing from them at all, and at once become bankrupt. The sum-total of difficulty and embarrassment thus occasioned, is not to be measured by the amount of specie or bank-notes actually withdrawn from circulation by the Bank of England, though that on occasion of the present crisis has been very considerable. It is to be measured by the shock given to credit; the increase in the practice of hoarding, which a feeling of general insecurity never fails to engender; the reluctance in the country banks to make advances; the universal effort made to recover debts at the very time when the means of discharging them have been rendered most difficult; the rapid diminution in the private bills put in circulation from the experienced impossibility of getting them discounted. The contraction of the currency on the part of the Bank of England, from July 1846, when it was £21,000,000, to September 1847, when it was only £17,840,000, was no less than £3,160,000. Including the simultaneous and consequent contraction by the country banks in Great Britain and Ireland, the diminution of the paper currency was above £5,000,000. But this, considerable as it is, was but a small part of the evil. The bills in circulation in Great Britain in 1839 were estimated by Mr Leatham, a most experienced Yorkshire banker, at £130,000,000. In 1845, it may safely be assumed, that they had reached £160,000,000 or £170,000,000. Without a doubt this immense sum was reduced by at least a fourth, probably a half, from the contraction of the currency consequent on the Bank Act of 1844. It is this prodigious contraction, the necessary consequence of the banks having been rendered unable or unwilling to discount bills, which is the real cause of the present universal distress and general stoppage of all undertakings. And it was the more ruinous from the circumstance, that it occurred at _the very time_ when, from the vast encouragement given by government to domestic railways by the bills they passed, and to foreign trade from the abolition of the main duties protective of industry by them, the nation was landed in transactions of unheard-of magnitude, and producing an unparalleled strain upon its metallic resources.