substitute for them for ever inconvertible notes and transfers on the Books of the Bank, though now forgotten, expressed the opinions of a large portion of his contemporaries.* He saw that

we were in danger of returning to a metallic curreney, and came to the rescue of his theory. On the 27th of June 1811, he laid on the table of the House of Lords, a bill making it illegal to receive or to pay gold or bank-notes at more or less than their nominal value. At first it was ill received by the government, and Lord Liverpool said that he should oppose it on the second reading. On the second reading, the 2d of July, Lord King answered Lord Stanhope by a Speech which is our only specimen of his powers as a speaker, since it is the only one that has been correctly reported. It shows how much we have lost. Nothing can be clearer, or more concise, or more complete, than his defence of the equity and of the expediency of his conduct.

'Since the late decision,' he said, of the House of Commons, it appears to be the declared intention of the government that the restriction shall continue to the end of the war, however distant that period may be. The subject is thus brought home to the individual interest of every man whose property is yearly, even monthly deteriorated. Every hope and prospect of amelioration being destroyed, there appears no choice but either to submit with tame resignation to receive payment in currency, of whatever value it shall please the Bank of England, in their forbearance and moderation, to permit henceforth to belong to the currency of the country; or to have recourse to the remedy which individuals possess by law. There is also another reason, which, I confess, has had some influence with me. It was asked insultingly, in another place, whether any person had ever yet ventured to refuse bank paper in payment or satisfaction of a lawful debt; and, on that foundation, it was attempted to be argued that, in point of fact, there existed no difference between paper and gold, and no actual depreciation. By bringing this question to issue, at least one of the remaining wretched supports of this fatal system will be overthrown. In this state of things, for the defence of my property, I have thought it advisable, to inform my tenants holding lands under old leases, and under old leases only, that I can no longer continue to receive bank-notes at their nominal value. The plain broad principle upon which I have acted is, to require payment in a currency of the same intrinsic value which the currency possessed at the date of each respective agreement. Where, may I ask, is the hardship of this demand? In proportion as the currency is depreciated, the price of wheat, of cattle, of all the produce of the land, is augmented. The tenant suffers no loss, if he is required to make only an equitable compensation;

They are to be found in the Edinburgh Annual Register for 1811, Part ii. p. 291.

he has already received an advance in the sale of his produce; he is only prevented from acquiring an additional profit, to which he can have no just claim. To any increase of price, in consequence of the increasing opulence and prosperity of the country, the tenant is in every sense justly entitled. The two causes of the increased price are totally distinct: the one arises from the fair increased demand and consumption of the country, which may well have entered into the calculation of the amount of rent; the other proceeds from an anomaly in the currency, which never could have entered into the contemplation of the parties.

Having acted on principles such as I have described, and being satisfied with my own conduct, I shall not be deterred by clamour, or by any imputation whatever, by which it may be attempted to prevent me from insisting, at the same time with firmness and moderation, on a just and legal demand. It may suit the interest of some persons, by such unworthy means, to attempt to put down that which they hesitate and fear to do by legislative interference, notwithstanding the facility with which of late years acts of Parliament have been passed to suit the convenience or inconvenience of the moment. It was attempted in France to intimidate individuals who preferred the good metallic money to worthless assignats, by branding them with the charge of incivism, or incivic practices, in the revolutionary phrase; and, to judge from the language of his Majesty's servants, who are endeavouring to inculcate the acceptance of paper money as a moral and political duty, we are here also to be governed according to the true Jacobin doctrine, which required individuals to regulate their conduct, not by their own proper interest and convenience, but according to some speculative principles. In a well regulated state, the proper interest of individuals is inseparable from that of the government; and it is the duty of government to take care to avoid any system or state of things in which individuals, pursuing their own interest, and acting legally, shall have the appearance of acting at variance with the public interest. If the notes of the Bank of England are not depreciated in value, and if, in fact, there is no difference between paper and gold, the preference given to the latter will be an idle preference, of no public inconvenience, because it will not be followed. If the value of the bank paper is really at par, it is not in the power of any individual to alter the fact; and any attempt to do so would be despised as it deserved; but if, on the contrary, the bank paper is greatly inferior in value to gold coin and bullion, it is highly meritorious to expose and resist a system through which the whole community is impoverished and defrauded.

'It is said that some legislative interference is absolutely necessary to protect the tenants against the demand of their landlords, and on that account the bill is favourably received by those who profess to support the interests of the former. Little, indeed, do these men understand the interest of the tenant. If once the impious breach is made in existing contracts, if once the Legislature interferes with a violent hand, and tears out of the contract those positive stipulations, in faith of the due performance of which one of the parties has delivered over his valuable property, in the firm reliance that he shall be permitted to

receive what he considered as a valuable equivalent, but which condition is afterwards totally abrogated by an ex post facto law, there is an end of all faith both in public and private transactions. No man can henceforth place his dependence on the faith of contracts; the lands must be occupied by yearly tenants, for no landlords, after so dreadful a lesson of legislative injustice, will resign his property for a fixed term to the chance of an uncertain value. There has already appeared a visible and general unwillingness to agree to new leases for long terms; and any suspicion of the possibility of interference with existing contracts will extend that unwillingness to make leases even for the shortest periods.**

During the interval between the first and second readings, Lord Liverpool seems to have discovered that the government had been committed by its proceedings in the House of Commons, and that Lord Stanhope's bill was a necessary supplement to Mr Vansittart's resolutions. It is rarely that a Minister gives up consistency to truth or to policy; and Lord Liverpool was not a man from whom such a sacrifice was to be expected. He supported the bill, and it passed, and postponed for eight years longer the success of Lord King's efforts to give to the nationwhich is more dependent than any other existing community on the use of money-a money of stable value.

The return to Cash Payments was the only one of the three great reforms, already mentioned as Lord King's favourite measures, of which he lived to see the success. The other two,

the Commutation of Tithes and a Free Trade in Corn, have been discussed in this Journal, with a frequency which would make it altogether superfluous to resume the consideration of them here. It is possible, though we hope not probable, that some attempt to disturb the present settlement may force us to consider one or both of them again. But unless a desperate faction should reanimate them, we shall leave the bones of our enemies undisturbed. We have dwelt on Lord King's services in the Currency Question, partly because the time at which they were perfomed is now so distant that many of our readers may have forgotten them, while some perhaps never knew them; partly because there are some appearances connected with the period of the restriction, which, admirably as the history of that period has been written by Mr Tooke, seemed to us still to deserve expla nation; but principally, because this was the subject on which Lord King was pre-eminent both as a political philosopher and as a statesman. He laboured to release the producer of food from

*P. 231, et seq.

Tithe, and the consumer from Monopoly, with the same vigour and the same earnestness with which he had de voted himself to the restoration of the Currency; and it ought not to be forgotten, that this zealous impugner of the Corn Laws was himself a great landed proprietor, and that his Speeches, even in the meagre abstracts of them that have been preserved, disclose a familiar acquaintance with all those fundamental principles of commercial legislation that have been lately enforced, with such triumphant success, by the advocates of freedom. These great subjects, however, all-important as they were, afforded less room than that respecting the Currency for the exercise of his remarkable powers of analytical and inductive investigation. The part which he acted in regard to them, furnishes unquestionable proofs of his sagacity and his patriotism; but it is only by his Thoughts on the effects of the Bank restrictions,' that he has secured for himself a high and enduring place among the original thinkers in Political Science.

ART. III.-A History of Greece.-I. Legendary Greece.-II. Grecian History to the Reign of Peisistratus at Athens. By George Grote, Esq. Two vols. 8vo. London: 1846.

THE

HE interest of Grecian history is unexhausted and inexhaustible. As a mere story, hardly any other portion of authentic history can compete with it. Its characters, its situations, the very march of its incidents, are Epic. It is a heroic poem, of which the personages are peoples. It is also, of all histories of which we know so much, the most abounding in consequences to us who now live. The true ancestors of the European nations (it has been well said) are not those from whose blood they are sprung, but those from whom they derive the richest portion of their inheritance. The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings. If the issue of that day had been different, the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods.

The Greeks are also the most remarkable people who have yet existed. Not, indeed, if by this be meant those who have approached nearest (if such an expression may be used where all are at so immeasurable a distance) to the perfection of social arrangements or of human character. Their institutions, their way of life, even that which is their greatest distinction, the cast

of their sentiments and development of their faculties, were radically inferior to the best (we wish it could be said to the collective) products of modern civilization. It is not the results

achieved, but the powers and efforts required to make the achievement, that measure their greatness as a people. They were the beginners of nearly every thing, Christianity excepted, of which the modern world makes its boast. If in several things they were but few removes from barbarism, they alone among nations, so far as is known to us, emerged from barbarism by their own efforts, not following in the track of any more advanced people. If with them, as in all antiquity, slavery existed as an institution, they were not the less the originators of political freedom, and the grand exemplars and sources of it to modern Europe. If their discords, jealousies, and wars between city and city, caused the ruin of their national independence, yet the arts of war and government evolved in those intestine contests made them the first who united great empires under civilized rule—the first who broke down those barriers of petty nationality, which had been so fatal to themselves--and by making Greek ideas and language common to large regions of the earth, commenced that general fusion of races and nations, which, followed up by the Romans, prepared the way for the cosmopolitism of modern times.

They were the first people who had a historical literature; as perfect of its kind (though not the highest kind) as their oratory, their poetry, their sculpture, and their architecture. They were the founders of mathematics; of physics; of the inductive study of politics, so early exemplified in Aristotle; of the philosophy of human nature and life. In each they made the indispensable first steps, which are the foundation of all the rest-steps such as could only have been made by minds intrinsically capable of every thing which has since been accomplished. With a religious creed eminently unfavourable to speculation, because affording a ready supernatural solution of all natural phenomena, they yet originated freedom of thought. They, the first, questioned nature and the universe by their rational faculties, and brought forth answers not suggested by any established system of priestcraft ; and their free and bold spirit of speculation it was, which, surviving in its results, broke the yoke of another enthralling system of popular religion, sixteen hundred years after they had ceased to exist as a people. These things were effected in two centuries of national existence-twenty and upwards have since elapsed, and it is sad to think how little comparatively has been accomplished.

To give a faithful and living portraiture of such a people-to