The extreme accuracy and dispatch with which the clerical labor involved in the business of the Stock Offices is performed, is almost marvellous, and reflects the highest credit on the administrative machinery of the Bank. Every possible expedient is resorted to for the purpose of facilitating the work and guarding against error, even to the free employment of the Bank’s printing-office and the use of the stereotype process in the preparation of the dividend books in duplicate. It is worth mentioning that all the old stock ledgers, transfer books, vouchers, and documents connected with the various stocks which have been created since the establishment of the Bank are carefully preserved and systematically arranged for ready reference in the Stock Office Library under the charge of a librarian, whose duties, however, though involving great responsibility, are more monotonous than onerous. The “Issue Department” of the Bank of England is the outcome of the determination expressed by the Government in 1844 “to regulate the issue of bank notes.” The experience of former years, more particularly that of 1825, had fully demonstrated how undesirable, and even dangerous, it was to leave the circulation of bank notes to the uncontrolled discretion of country bankers, and though there can be no reason to doubt that the Bank of England had hitherto used the power which they possessed of expanding or contracting their circulation at will with great judgment, and substantially to the benefit of the mercantile community, it was thought desirable that the control of the whole circulation in the country should be practically vested in the State, and be governed by some sound financial principle. The theoretical basis of the Act of 1844 is the principle that bank notes should not be mere symbols of credit—simple I O U’s, as it were, which are a confession of a want of cash—but of actual “ear-marked” gold; of ready money, which alone regulates, or should regulate, the extent of the commerce of the country. The soundness of this principle is doubted by many financial authorities on the ground that it checks the proper expansion of trade and in times of crisis has failed in practice. I cannot, however, here discuss the large subject of currency, but must accept the law as I find it, merely stating that in my opinion it affords the only safe basis upon which any sound currency can be regulated. To carry out this law effectually, then, it was obviously necessary that the Government should create or select some establishment from which bank notes might be issued, and in which the gold that these notes represented should be set apart or stored. As the State Bank, the Bank of England was naturally entrusted with these functions. Hence the creation of the “Issue Department.” But in order to afford some elasticity to the circulation, and to deal gently with the “vested interests” of the Bank of England and country bankers