large drain of gold, we may be reduced, and are at this moment becoming so, to so contracted a circulation, that trade must necessarily stand still for the sheer want of a common representative of property. Why, and on what principles, the amount of our paper circulation was fixed at so low a point, we are utterly unable to conceive, unless it was for the purpose of compelling a large portion of our trading capital to remain fruitless and withdrawn from use in the form of unprofitable gold. Thirty-two millions, even in ordinary times, is not above one-half of what is required for the needful circulation of the country. In 1810 the currency of the paper for the three kingdoms was not less than sixty millions; and during the thirty-seven years which have elapsed since that time, not only has our population increased at an enormous ratio, but our trade and enterprise augmented in a more than corresponding degree. The tendency, however, of our improved system of banking has been to reduce the circulation within the lowest possible limit; but that limit was necessarily variable, and adjusted itself to meet the occurring contingencies of the country. Now it is fixed by the legislature at a point so low, that we are absolutely dependent upon the amount of gold which we can retain in the country, for the means of commercial interchange. We are obliged at present, it seems, to transport a large portion of our gold to America for the purchase of food. For every sovereign which leaves our shores a note is taken out of circulation, and no means whatever are permitted to individuals or to banking companies to supply the deficiency. In ordinary times, it might be expected that the gold would again find its way to Britain; at present, however, it is absorbed and scattered for the purpose of enabling America to prosecute her aggressive war against Mexico. And of what use, we ask, to the nation at large, are some ten or twelve millions converted into specie and stored up in the vaults beneath the Bank of England? Sir Robert Peel tells us, with a smile of peculiar complacency, that the hoarding up of so much bullion is a safeguard against a panic, because it renders any run upon the banks for gold a matter of absolute impossibility. With only thirty-two millions of paper extant for the common circulation of the nation, we shrewdly suspect that any apprehensions of a run upon the banks are as visionary as the dreams of El Dorado. No one knows better than Sir Robert Peel that the paper currency of a country must be sorely depreciated indeed before any such event can take place; and surely there are many means of preventing an over-issue, without bringing us to such a pass that in every season of scarcity or of war we must be reduced to an absolute halt--which, in a commercial country like ours, is a word equivalent to the impoverishment and the ruin of thousands.