CHAP. VIII.] A NEW PLAN OF FINANCE. 413 are not extinct yet at a distance of nearly forty years. There are still followers of Joanna Southcote, meeting for worship in a town here and there; and their interpretation of the Scriptures, to support their own case, is an outstanding appeal for the promotion of popular education. It is not necessary for this that Joanna's followers should all have been poor people. It is true that the gorgeous cradle, in which the Messiah was to be rocked, was given by "a lady of fortune;" and that the silver cup and salver, with the globe and the dove, were presented by middleclass contributors; and that a London physican sat, as a believer, by the bedside of the prophetess: but the bulk of the sect were poor; and the whole may be pronounced ignorant. In 1813, Mr. Vansittart announced a new plan of Finance, and carried his proposal, in the teeth of the opposition of every economist in parliament. The subject of the Debt will recur where it must be more fully treated of than is necessary here; and it need only be said now that, in 1813, the nation paid taxes to the amount of 176,346,0237.; and yet, that Mr. Vansittart believed our financial affairs to be so flourishing that he was growing uneasy about the vast power that would be in the hands of Parliament whenever the Sinking Fund should have nearly paid off the Debt. He now proposed to tamper with that fund; and could not see that to divert it from its purpose was to break faith with the national creditor. We find him telling parliament that the Sinking Fund has already redeemed 240,000,000l. — the whole amount of the Debt at the time of its institution ; whereas, every financier now knows that the Debt was, at this date, heavier by 11,000,000%.1 than if no Sinking Fund had been instituted. Since the Peace of Amiens, 420,000,000l. had been added to the capital of the Debt. The true method of redemption, by means of Terminable Annuities, had, by this time, been entered upon. It began in 1808; but it was not on this that Mr. Vansittart built his hopes and expectations. After providing for paying a debt on one hand by borrowing at higher interest on the other, he now proposed to alter and amend the Acts relating to the reduction of the Debt, admitting thereby the control of parliament over funds excluded by those Acts from parliamentary interference. The fallacy of the Sinking Fund system, as then managed, was not apparent to the nation during the war so completely was its operation hidden by the process of raising annual loans, to cover deficiencies. At the close of the war, when, in the absence of loans, Parliament borrowed from the Sinking Fund Commissioners, year after year, people began to perceive how delusive had been the notion that the Debt had ever diminished at all; and, as we shall see, the mischievous child's 1 Political Dictionary, ii. p. 404. 414 STOCK EXCHANGE FRAUD. [Book II. play came to an end. By that time, men were wondering how Mr. Vansittart could have obtained his majorities in 1813. His doctrine was, simply,1 that obedience to the Acts only required that the Debt should be payed off in forty-five years from the institution of the Sinking Fund; and that it was justifiable, and would be now prudent, to take whatever was left over from the sum necessary for this, and apply it to general purposes, to save the necessity of imposing new taxes. It cannot be necessary to expose the fallacy and bad faith of this scheme to readers who, long after the expiration of the forty-five years, are living under a Debt which has been largely increased instead of abolished. Stock Ex fraud. Lord In February, 1814, an incident occurred which appears not to have been explained to the satisfaction of anybody, change to this day. A person, dressed in a nondescript officer's uniform,2 with a long beard, wet clothes, and an appearance of extreme fatigue, appeared in the middle of the night in Dover, declaring that he had just landed from a boat, and must proceed instantly to London, to announce the death of Napoleon. He paid his way, even at the toll-bars, with Napoleons. The bustle at the Stock Exchange was just what his employers intended to create. A plot of the same sort was prepared, and partly enacted, at Northfleet, in case of the miscarriage of the Dover scheme. Lord Cochrane, with Cochrane. others, was tried in the Court of King's Bench, found guilty of being one of the authors of this extraordinary fraud, and condemned to a year's imprisonment, a fine of 1000%., and the pillory. Much sympathy was naturally felt, from the outset, with an officer who had served his country bravely and effectually; and when the evidence against him on the trial was so strong as to stagger his nearest friends, the sympathy was kept up by the injustice of the procedure, and the enormity of the sentence. All England revolted at the sentence of the pillory for such an offence, though England had not yet revolted at the pillory in all cases. That part of the sentence was not inflicted. Lord Cochrane was expelled from the House of Commons by a large majority; but immediately reëlected for Westminster. Some of the electors, we are assured, believed him innocent; and most declared him to have been unfairly tried. He was, for a quarter of a century, stopped in his professional career; that is, he served with a bravery almost eccentric, and a genius which would have raised him to the summit of fame, but for the drawback of this transaction. At length, he received the title of Lord Dundonald, and was held to have emerged 1 Hansard, xxiv. p. 1081. 8 Hansard, xxviii. p. 606, 2 Annual Register, 1814. Chron. p. 19. CHAP. VIII.] EXTRAORDINARY WEATHER. 415 from the cloud which had so long obscured his name and for tunes. weather. The winter of 1814 was so remarkable in regard to weather, that some of the facts should be recorded. The sus- Extraorpension of business, and even of the mails, was ex- dinary tremely inconvenient. Every effort was made to forward the mails - by a chaise and four here by men on horseback there; but for several weeks, not even government could be sure of its letters on the right day. The portreeve of Tavistock set out,1 one January day, to take the oaths of his office at the Quarter Sessions, only thirty-two miles off; but, at the end of twenty-one miles, he was stopped by snow and ice; and there he was detained for twenty-six days, unable to communicate with home, or any other place than the village in which he was imprisoned. Soldiers were frozen to death on the road, in their march from town to town. The snow drifted in the streets to such a height that the shops were closed; and the accumulation of ice and snow about London bridge was such that the passage was nearly closed by the middle of January. By the 1st of February, the Thames was completely frozen over. A bullock was roasted whole on the ice; booths were erected, and a kind of fair held, where the citizens, whose business was stopped, amused their enforced leisure. This stoppage of business was by this time so serious a matter - and chiefly from the failure of the remittances on which the merchants depended for taking up their bills that all the powers of the Post-Office were put forth to compel the overseers of parishes and surveyors of highways to clear the roads. Near Huntingdon, a strange sight was seen when several days had elapsed without the arrival of any mail. An official personage was sent down from the General Post-Office, with orders to get the mails to and from the north through, at all hazards. The mail-coach appeared at length, completely filled and loaded with bags, and drawn by ten exhausted horses, which had forced and floundered their way through banks and hills of snow. It was a dreary season for many a wife and mother, whose husband did not return, and could not be heard of. The children must be kept warm and amused at home, all day long; and they had not even the diversion of looking out of the windows; for the snow was drifted against them. It was difficult to communicate with the butcher; and, as for coals, if the stock ran low, there were no more to be had. No coals could get to London; and there was no passage by any of the rivers. Where there was an attempt to hold a market, no poultry or vegetables were to be seen; and the people could not endure the cold—either sellers or buyers. The 1 Annual Register, 1814. Chron. p. 13. 416 NEW CUSTOM-HOUSE. [Воок II. water-pipes were all frozen; and the snow was melted for water the pails of thawing snow within the fenders making the house insufferably cold. The only alternative was to take up the plugs in the streets; and then, if the water came, it was immediately transformed into dangerous sheets of ice. Amidst such domestic discomfort, many a mistress of a household was left for weeks uncertain of the fate of her husband if he happened to be in any of the hilly districts of the island. The Solway was frozen over, for the first time within the memory of living men. Many were the boats and coasting vessels, whose crews were kept starving and shivering out at sea, from the heaping of ice about the shores. On land, one of the gravest apprehensions was of fire; for there would be great difficulty in putting it out. Several bad fires did happen during the period of frost; but a worse occurred just after water was once more seen in the Thames. House. In the Great Fire of London, the Custom-House was one of the buildings destroyed. It was replaced by one Burning of the Custom- which was thought very grand in its day; but it was found to be inconveniently small in the beginning of the 18th century. In 1718, it was burned down; and a much larger one was erected in its stead. This larger one was found, in its turn, too small for the increased commerce of a century; and a new one had been planned, during late years, and was actually begun when, on the 12th of February, 1814, the existing Custom-House was burned down to the ground.1 The building itself was not much to be regretted; but an untold amount of property perished; and, worse still, papers of inestimable value. The coral and pearls, the silks, the books, the bank-notes, the pictures, were a great loss; but much more lamentable was the destruction of antique documents, relating to the commerce of past centuries. Bonds, debentures, and securities of various kinds, perished to such an amount as to derange 'he transactions of commerce, and threaten the resources of government to a formidable extent. Vessels ready to clear out on the breaking up of the ice were detained; one merchant lost 6000l. worth of bank-notes, the list of their numbers being locked up with them. By an explosion of gunpowder in the cellars, bundles and fragments of burnt paper were scattered on the roads at New Custom- Dalston and Hackney; and a packet of singed debenHouse. tures was picked up in Spital Square. There was now every inducement to press forward the erection of the new Custom-House. The first stone had been laid by Lord Liverpool in the preceding October; and the present building was opened for business on the 12th of May, 1817. Many people 1 Annual Register, 1814. Chron. p. 13. CHAP. VIII.] CENSURE OF ARCHITECT. afterwards thought that the speed had been too great. 417 The site the old bed of the river was a difficult one for such a foundation as was required. Within ten years, the foundations of the Long Room gave way. Examination of the facts was made by a Parliamentary Committee, in 1828; and a severe censure was passed upon the architect. An additional expense of above 170,000l. was incurred; and the cost of our CustomHouse, of the present century, was thereby raised to nearly half a million sterling. It is a matter of curious speculation how soon it will be outgrown by the National Commerce, and what will become of it. We may hope that warning enough has been given by the fate of its three predecessors; and that it will not be destroyed by fire. |