CURRENCY. 133, 



war on Holland, were of great advantage to Dutch commerce. 

 The exchanges were almost always in their favour, while 

 (as far as the record is preserved to us) they were nearly 

 always more or less adverse to London, and sometimes 

 seriously so. In brief, Dutch commercial credit and Dutch 

 paper money were in equally high repute, and the Amster- 

 dam exchange dominated the trade of Europe. 



It was natural that the success of the Amsterdam bank, 

 even before the events of 1672, when its solvency was so 

 strongly demonstrated, should excite the envy of English 

 traders and suggest the imitation of the institution in London. 

 There were at least two proposals to establish a bank of 

 deposit in London made during the Commonwealth. But 

 the difficulty was to find the machinery of management. 

 The government of Cromwell was always precarious, that 

 of Charles profligate, dishonest, rapacious and perfidious. It 

 is not too much to say that there was no political virtue in 

 English public men after the Restoration, very little for 

 a long time after the Revolution. There was nothing in 

 London like the city authorities of Amsterdam, nothing 

 with powers like theirs, nothing with a corporate character 

 like theirs. Besides, had the Corporation of London been 

 ever so vigorous and high-principled, they were (as the raid 

 on the Charters showed) at the mercy of the vile lawyers 

 whom the Court debauched, and kept on foot as the standing 

 enemies of all justice and honour. That a bank should be 

 founded by the Corporation of London, and controlled by 

 it, was out of the question. It was not without reason that 

 men argued that a public bank and monarchy were incom- 

 patible. It was not much to the honour of monarchy that 

 such an incompatibility could be detected, for the state- 

 ment implied that public credit and monarchical institutions 

 could not live together. They could not coexist till the 

 Stewarts had been expelled and a new departure had been 

 taken. 



It has often been said that the Bank of England, founded 



