This bank is a great corporation; the Board of Directors is composed of twenty-six members, who elect their own successors, and thus it is entirely independent. It makes laws for its own direction in the name of the people or defies their control. In 1797 it secured an order from the privy council ordering itself to suspend specie payment. It obeyed its own order promptly, and at the same time announced their strength and that the order would be temporary; but for one excuse and another it was continued for twenty-five years. Sir Robert Peel, in 1844, having become convinced of the dangerous and disastrous influence, expanding and contracting its loans, secured the enactment of a law to regulate and limit its circulation. This law was distasteful to the bank, and was, upon its enactment, defied by open disobedience. It has not only dictated the laws for its own regulation, but directed both the domestic and the foreign policy of the government. It has subordinated the public weal to financial profit. This corporation of usurers manage all the finances of the kingdom, and has more influence than Crown and Parliament combined. As a great uncrowned king it dictates the diplomatic policies of the United Kingdom. Its influence has not been extended to promote Protestant Christian faith, Jews are not zealous for any Christian sect; nor for the purpose of lifting up the degraded and enlightening them; nor in the east has it exercised its power to relieve human suffering, but its diplomatic policy has been mercenary greed always. It should be noted that the enlightened Christian people of the United Kingdom are not the English government. There has been, for two hundred years, a power behind the Throne, behind Parliament, behind the people, essentially selfish and commercial. This has controlled India for profit, while the benevolent people were anxious to christianize and uplift. It has befriended the Turk while England wept over the Turkish barbarities. It forced opium upon China while the Christian people sent missionaries. The people of England love freedom, yet the government has endeavored to crush it in the American colonies and everywhere throughout the world, when in conflict with a selfish commercial policy. The English people cry out against human slavery, yet in the struggle in the United States, when slavery was in the balance, the English government earnestly espoused the cause of those who upheld slavery. The English people rejoiced that the slave trade in Africa was abolished, yet the government enacted the hut tax, and compels now the service of the young and vigorous blacks in the mines, sending them back to their people when their strength declines.