Two hundred and forty stopped payment at one dash, and ninety-two subjected to commissions of bankruptcy. They were not indeed chartered banks, for there are none such in England, except the Bank of England; but they were legalized establishments, existing under the first joint-stock bank act of 1708; and they were banks of issue. Yet they were subjected to the bankrupt laws, ninety-two of them in a single season of bank catalepsy; their broken "promises to pay" were taken out of circulation; their doors closed; their directors and officers turned out; their whole effects, real and personal, their money, debts, books, paper, and every thing, put into the hands of assignees; and to these assignees, the holders of their notes forwarded their demands, and were paid, every one in equal proportion--as the debts of the bank were collected, and its effects converted into money; and this without expense or trouble to any one of them. Ninety-two banks in England shared this fate in a single season of bank mortality; five hundred more could be enumerated in other seasons, many of them superior in real capital, credit, and circulation, to our famous chartered banks, most of which are banks of moonshine, built upon each other's paper; and the whole ready to fly sky-high the moment any one of the concern becomes sufficiently inflated to burst. The immediate effect of this application of the bankrupt laws to banks in England, is two-fold: first, to save the general currency from depreciation, by stopping the issue and circulation of irredeemable notes; secondly, to do equal justice to all creditors, high and low, rich and poor, present and absent, the widow and the orphan, as well as the cunning and the powerful, by distributing their effects in proportionate amounts to all who hold demands. This is the operation of bankrupt laws upon banks in England, and all over the British empire; and it happens to be the precise check upon the issue of broken bank paper, and the precise remedy for the injured holders of their dishonored paper which the President recommends. Here is his recommendation, listen to it: "In the mean time, it is our duty to provide all the remedies against a depreciated paper currency which the constitution enables us to afford. The Treasury Department, on several former occasions, has suggested the propriety and importance of a uniform law concerning bankruptcies of corporations and other bankers. Through the instrumentality of such a law, a salutary check may doubtless be imposed on the issues of paper money, and an effectual remedy given to the citizen, in a way at once equal in all parts of the Union, and fully authorized by the constitution."