The motion of the senator from Pennsylvania [Mr. BUCHANAN] is intended to remedy this vice in these District banks; it is intended to impose an obligation on these banks to keep in their vaults a quantum of specie bearing a certain proportion to the amount of their immediate liabilities in circulation and deposits. The gentleman's motion is well intended, but it is defective in two particulars: first, in requiring the proportion to be the one-fourth, instead of the one-third, and next, in making it apply to the private deposits only. The true proportion is one-third, and this to apply to all the circulation and deposits, except those which are special. This proportion has been fixed for a hundred years at the Bank of England; and just so often as that bank has fallen below this proportion, mischief has occurred. This is the sworn opinion of the present Governor of the Bank of England, and of the directors of that institution. Before Lord Althorpe's committee in 1832, Mr. Horsley Palmer, the Governor of the Bank, testified in these words: "'The average proportion, as already observed, of coin and bullion which the bank thinks it prudent to keep on hand, is at the rate of a third of the total amount of all her liabilities, including deposits as well as issues.' Mr. George Ward Norman, a director of the bank, states the same thing in a different form of words. He says: 'For a full state of the circulation and the deposits, say twenty-one millions of notes and six millions of deposits, making in the whole twenty-seven millions of liabilities, the proper sum in coin and bullion for the bank to retain is nine millions.' Thus, the average proportion of one-third between the specie on hand and the circulation and deposits, must be considered as an established principle at that bank, which is quite the largest, and amongst the oldest--probably, the very oldest bank of circulation in the world." The Bank of England is not merely required to keep on hand, in bullion, the one-third of its immediate liabilities; it is bound also to let the country see that it has, or has not, that proportion on hand. By an act of the third year of William IV., it is required to make quarterly publications of the average of the weekly liabilities of the bank, that the public may see whenever it descends below the point of safety. Here is the last of these publications, which is a full exemplification of the rule and the policy which now governs that bank: Quarterly average of the weekly liabilities and assets of the Bank of England, from the 12th December, 1837, to the 6th of March, 1838, both inclusive, published pursuant to the act 3 and William IV., cap. 98: