From Chaucer to Tennyson
Chautauqua Reading Circle Literature FROM CHAUCER TO TENNYSON WITH TWENTY-NINE PORTRAITS AND SELECTIONS FROM THIRTY AUTHORS. BY HENRY A. BEERS _Professor of English Literature in Yale University_. [Illustration]
If we ask how the Bank of England has discharged this great
responsibility, we shall be struck by three things: first, as has
been said before, the Bank has never by any corporate act or
authorised utterance acknowledged the duty, and some of its
directors deny it; second (what is even more remarkable), no
resolution of Parliament, no report of any Committee of Parliament
(as far as I know), no remembered speech of a responsible statesman,
has assigned or enforced that duty on the Bank; third (what is more
remarkable still), the distinct teaching of our highest authorities
has often been that no public duty of any kind is imposed on the
Banking Department of the Bank; that, for banking purposes, it is
only a joint stock bank like any other bank; that its managers
should look only to the interest of the proprietors and their
dividend; that they are to manage as the London and Westminster Bank
or the Union Bank manages.
At first, it seems exceedingly strange that so important a
responsibility should be unimposed, unacknowledged, and denied; but
the explanation is this. We are living amid the vestiges of old
controversies, and we speak their language, though we are dealing
with different thoughts and different facts. For more than fifty
yearsfrom 1793 down to 1844, there was a keen controversy as to the
public duties of the Bank. It was said to be the 'manager' of the
paper currency, and on that account many expected much good from it;
others said it did great harm; others again that it could do neither
Chautauqua Reading Circle Literature FROM CHAUCER TO TENNYSON WITH TWENTY-NINE PORTRAITS AND SELECTIONS FROM THIRTY AUTHORS. BY HENRY A. BEERS _Professor of English Literature in Yale University_. [Illustration]