THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION 51 
in very slowly, and a considerable time had therefore been allow- | 
ed by the Act. This indulgence was not needed. So popular was 
the new investment that on the day on which the books were 
opened three hundred thousand pounds were subscribed; three 
hundred thousand more were subseribed during the next 
forty-eight hours; and, in ten days, to the delight of all the friends 
of the Government, it was announced that the list was full. The 
whole sum which the Corporation was bound to lend to the State 
was paid in to the Exchequer before the first instalment was due. 
Somers gladly put the Great Seal to a charter framed in con- 
formity with the terms prescribed by Parliament; and the Bank 
of England commenced its operations in the house of the Com- 
pany of Grocers. There, during many years, directors, secretar- 
ies and clerks might be seen laboring in different parts of one 
spacious hall. The persons employed by the Bank were origin- 
ally only fifty-four. They are now nine hundred. The sum paid 
yearly in salaries amounted at first to only four thousand three 
hundred and fifty pounds. It now exceeds two hundred and 
ten thousand pounds. 
It soon appeared that Montague had, by skillfully availing 
himself of the financial difficulties of the country, rendered an 
inestimable service to his party. During several generations the 
Bank of England was emphatically a Whig body. It was Whig, 
not accidentally, but necessarily. It must have instantly stop- 
ped payment if it ceased to receive the interest on the sum which 
it had advanced to the government; and of that interest James 
the Pretender would not have paid one farthing. Seventeen 
years after the passing of the Tonnage Bill, Addison, in one of 
his most ingenious and graceful little allegories, described the 
situation of the great Company through which the immense 
wealth of London was constantly circulating. He saw Publie 
Credit on her throne in Grocers’ Hall, the Great Charter over her 
head, the Act of Settlement full in her view. Her touch turned 
everything to gold. Behind her seat, bags filled with gold were 
piled up to the ceiling. On her right and on her left the floors 
were hidden by pyramids of guineas. On a sudden the door flies 
open. The Pretender rushes in, a sponge in one hand, in the 
