In the reign of Elizabeth a good deal of cash was borrowed on the security of land, and a good many estates changed hands. Many gentlemen of moderate property were dazzled by the reports as to El Dorado, and either joined companies of adventurers eager to colonise some portion of the New World, or fitted out ships to prey upon Spanish commerce. These semi-piratical enterprises demanded ready money, and many broad acres held in fee-simple, with many a grey manor-house nestling among its elms, were melted down in the crucible whence Hope promised to extract the ingots of the wonderful Western Indies. The heavy fines and crushing assessments imposed by Cromwell's major-generals on malignants, compelled numbers of royalists to mortgage estates that they never had the means to redeem, and a large portion of the soil of England passed at that time from the hands of its former proprietors. Almost simultaneously, Britannia herself appeared in the market as a borrower. The first public creditors had very little idea of their own position with respect to the many-headed debtor to whom they lent a few hundred pounds at a time. They trusted the worshipful the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or they obliged his honour the Teller, or they dropped their mite into the ever-ready hand of the Lord High Treasurer, exactly as they would have offered the same accommodation to a great merchant, whose wool had not yet been paid for by his Genoese customers. The theory of the National Debt, as of the nation's income and its outlay, was formerly a very simple one. The king, out of his own revenues, was supposed to keep up in time of peace the whole machinery of government. It was for him to pay the judges, and such other functionaries, few, indeed, as were directly dependent on the crown, to provide for the civil needs of the country, and to maintain such institutions as were not self-supporting. As these costs and charges gradually increased, parliament had to vote grants in aid of the royal purse, and as the ministers of state, like other persons, often outran the constable, a little friendly help from London citizens was frequently required. But the worthy men who supplied the necessities of the Treasury would have stood aghast at the conception of a funded debt. That these should not get their money back at all, unless by selling their claim, at a fluctuating and capricious rate of value, in open market to somebody else, would have seemed to them little better than flat robbery. Theirs was a running account with the king and his servants, and it was fully understood that the skinners, and drapers, and mercers who lent a thousand pounds should be paid by their august debtor, so soon as the latter should have tided over his temporary embarrassments. Gradually, as the nation grew richer and more restless, it became customary to lend spare cash and superfluous savings to His Majesty Charles the Second. The lenders must have well understood the personal character of this unprincipled recipient of their hard-earned coin. King Charles, as Macaulay tells us, broke faith with the public creditor, but he was one of those princes whose worst deeds are gently done. He had no idea, for instance, of that blank repudiation which turned the stock of Pennsylvania into waste paper saleable by weight to the butterman. "Spanish deferred" would to him have been as unintelligible as the Cabala, and the various rogueries and rascalities by which the bonds of some South American states have been brought to their present selling price, were as Greek and Hebrew to his uninstructed mind. The problem, so far as he was concerned, was easily solved. The king, as king, borrowed, and he could not pay the principal, nor was the interest always forthcoming. There was the French Duchess of Portsmouth, there was Nell Gwynn, there were other daughters of the horseleech, hustling and struggling with importunate courtiers for a share of the royal plunder. Whitehall was as bare of ready money as might be expected from a palace where Barbara Palmer and Maria Mancini were in authority over a weak and lavish monarch, and whence the king could draw upon the Exchequer as a country gentleman draws upon his banker. But there was corn in Egypt. There was cash in England, and the newly-established Post Office was a paying concern, and the chimney money brought in its solid halfmillion with a certainty equal to that of the curses with which cottagers pursued those who gathered it, and already the income of England began to show the strange elasticity which has since kept our heads above water through long wars and fierce domestic discontent. William of Orange, when he mounted the English throne, must surely have brought with him a complete financial guide, since from his time we date the funding of our debt. The Dutch were, indeed, our masters in this matter. In Holland there were banks and bankers, when in England our goldsmiths were just beginning to emulate their Amsterdam correspondents by giving a receipt for cash deposited. It was soon found that a goldsmith's receipt, in the absence of the as yet undreamed-of banknote, would go the round of London traffic, and could conveniently be transferred from hand to hand, without calling into requisition the apparatus by which the sterling value of the current coin of the realm, then unmilled, and therefore sadly liable to cutting, and clipping, and filing, had to be tested. Yet a little while, and a poor Scotchman, learned in foreign finance, would found the Bank of England, and the Old Lady of Threadneedle-street begin a long and prosperous career, during which her bright example has been followed by affiliated daughters in all lands, from the powerful Bank of France to the puny weakling of some striving South Sea colony. In a piecemeal, hap-hazard way, private persons with something to lend learned that they might invest their money securely in the public debt of any well-reputed state. They must not, it is true, expect repayment from the corporate debtor. But some one else would be willing to buy their rights as regarded the money due from the government. The interest was ready to the day. And, despite all temptations to reap an immediate comfort by dishonesty, some countries, England and Holland at their head, have sturdily maintained their credit at huge self-sacrifice, and have never put off a creditor with vexatious excuses or fraudulent deductions. Good deeds like these shine very far in the naughty world of the money market. Credit is, indeed, like the fabled ermine that dies of shame if there be but a spot to sully its pure white. France was lately the chief of commercial nations on the Continent, yet her financial good name has never quite recovered that ugly little history of the days of the Directory, of the forced circulation of paper, of the national creditor gagged or guillotined, and of assignats so depreciated that eighteen hundred francs in paper money would barely buy a breakfast at a second-rate café on the Boulevards. Austria has been twice bankrupt, and the inexplicable favour with which her securities are regarded in most European exchanges is rather a personal homage of the stock-jobbers (usually an unimaginative race) to the good inten tions of the House of Hapsburg, than a certain criterion that the heterogeneous empire is actually solvent. There are states with public debts with respect to which there is always a pleasing anxiety as to whether the next half-yearly coupon will be paid. Italy, Turkey, Egypt, lead off in this dance, while a few other countries of great undeveloped resources follow them. The question constantly occurs as to whether the party of action will or will not prevent the minister of finance from meeting his engagements; as to the chance that the vizier should muster the ready money for his Christian creditors; or the khedive's man of business have a golden sop to fling to the expectant Cerberus of English and French investers. The result is often akin to that which ensued when a fine old Irish gentleman contrived to remit from Castle Rackrent enough to satisfy the many claimants on the November rents. It was a squeeze and a struggle, but the awkward corner was turned at last, and there was every one's money, punctual to the moment. Washington Irving, in his Little Britain, speaks of an English optimist who never failed to prove that the public debt with which his country was burdened was, in effect, a great national bulwark and blessing. More natural, perhaps, to an ill-regulated mind was the surprise expressed by the Persian ambassador that the debt should endure when the unexampled park of artillery at Woolwich was competent, if wisely employed, to blow liabilities and creditors into infinite space. But really, when we consider the convenience which Consols afford to the large and timid rentier class, to nervous old gentlewomen, quiet widows, wary trustees, and the like, it almost seems as if, supposing no National Debt to exist for the comfort of these deserving persons, it would be necessary to create one. The It is very nice and pleasant to have within one's grasp a certainty. humblest fund-holder, who puts his little all into the Three per Cents, has his annual pittance better assured to him than had the longest-headed capitalist of the Whittington times. Dividend-day will bring to him, with machine-like regularity, the moderate fruits of his loan to sea-encompassed Albion. In the mean time, he has the importance that beseems the possessor of a stake in the country, and is the fractional proprietor of a first mortgage on Great Britain and Ireland. But then this unimpeachable security is attended by its usual shadow, whose name is Low Interest. Three per cent, with the Funds at over ninety, is but poor consideration for the giving up of all one's substance. Capital is, indeed, a magic wand, that can do nearly everything, but which it needs a skilled hand to manipulate. High interest, in dazzling raiment, like a spangled harlequin, walks the money-market hand in hand with bad security. Many are found, not unnaturally, to run after the glittering impostor, and to take his tinsel and paste jewels for genuine gold and gems. There are several South American republics, certain gold-mining and railway companies, land companies, water companies, the Great Laputa Joint Stock, and the Golconda Extension, which are always flashing their ten or fifteen per cent before the eyes of clergymen with some pounds and more olive branches, of the relicts of Indian colonels, and of the general public. The temptation is cruelly alluring. Never did silvery bait twirl more bewitchingly before a basking pike than does the bribe of two or three extra hundreds a year sparkle before a lady of contracted income, with three or four ambitious daughters, and a brace of sons whom she would like to see transformed into a bishop and a major-general. She must, she really must, as she declares (with the full consent of the chorus of daughters, growing old at Dullington, and eager to exhibit their charms on a wider stage), sell out of those stupid Consols, and give notice to leave the melancholy red-brick house, and "brighten up" with increased means. So she closes her account with Britannia, and becomes the creditor of his highness the Nawab of Needleput, or helps the republic of Santa Impecuniosa to make war on its enemies, domestic and foreign. For a time she gets thumping dividends. But when the insolvent rajah takes his last dram of opium, or the rebels succeed in bringing to drumhead court-martial all the legitimate authorities of the South American commonwealth, then comes a crash, with unpaid coupons, closed shutters, and the ruin of simple investers. It is not so easy now as it was a hundred years back to find a sure investment to bring in, say, five per cent on small terms of money. Formerly it was a common practice to buy, on easy terms, a rent-charge on the estate of some nobleman of great landed possessions, just as five hundred years ago it was fashionable to purchase a "corrody" in some abbey, and thenceforth to have beef, and beer, and white bread, a cell, and two yearly suits of clothes, for the residue of one's life. But peers manage matters otherwise now than was the rule when Hogarth etched his grim portraitures of manners. There are still some coroneted spendthrifts, but their nets no longer enclose the exceedingly small fish welcome to their great-great-grandfathers, and who paid their thousand or two of hard guineas for an annual slice of my lord's rents. And though a mortgage on minor properties is often obtainable, small estates are often so wrapped up in sheepskin, and prior claims, and ambiguous settlements, so bemuddled as to their title deeds, and so hazy as to their practical value, that a lender who has nothing to throw away in the law courts does not invariably find it facile to exercise the stringent powers which Themis presumably gives him. Great gains are often made in a quiet way. Indeed, the people who have the knack of absorbing, not dishonestly, the lion's share in every bargain, are precisely those who would blush to find their doings noised abroad by the blatant trumpet of fame. There are steady, church-going men in England, who turn all that they touch into gold for their private pockets. They wrong no one, but their clear brains, their strong will, and their command of cash, give them the whip-hand of those with whom they deal. In France this is still more the case. If there be one personage whom our lively neighbours regard as the incarnation of respectability, that personage is the notary. And, if there be a choice, the provincial notary is a shade more respectable than even his jauntier brother of Paris. He is a government officer to begin with, and, therefore, his sleek head is surrounded by the nimbus that belonged, till lately, in Gaul, to every bureaucratic functionary. Then his charge is worth money. He might forfeit it if he misbehaved. Were he in debt he must sell it. He keeps it, and is therefore solvent and well-conducted. He is forbidden by law to speculate with his private funds. He sits on the marguilliers' bench at the parish church; he wears spotless black, and a crumpled white cravat of unstarched cambric; he wears gold-rimmed spectacles, with perhaps a green shade as well, and in the button-hole of his brown great-coat there is an inch of that precious red ribbon that a Frenchman loves to look upon. Nothing is more fitting than that those who have savings to invest, and they are very many in thrifty Gaul, should repose boundless confidence in the notary's advice. occasional consternation, the fortunes of the money he had invested. It would be found now and then to have assumed odd forms. Even loans to governments may do much evil, as well as good. The cash of some benevolent man, whose utmost wrath against the flies would only lead him, like the butcher's daughter described by Corporal Trim, to drive them away, not to kill them, assists somebody to set themselves up in mitrailleuses and sword-bayonets. Harmless Mrs. Grundy's savings go to purchase grapeshot and Greek fire. But fortunately for their own peace of mind investers rarely distract themselves by inquisitive speculations as to what becomes of their money when they have once put it out at interest. IN THE EVENING. ALL day the wind had howled along the leas, Had fallen "the useful trouble of the rain," Notaries grow rich, as woodcocks were once supposed to grow fat, by suction. The labourer, whether he works in an office or a field, is worthy of his hire, and it is fair that the scrivener should live by Mammon's altar. But what enriches the notary above ordinary men is the engrossing passion of poor Frenchmen for land. A peasant, who hears of fields in the market, will give as much as a hundred pounds an acre for the freehold of sterile soil out of which it takes the toil of Hercules to make a living. He will work persistently, stubbornly, almost savagely, to wring every sack of potatoes and barrel of coarse wine out of his sandy fields and stony vineyard. To get more out of the land he sacrifices others besides himself. His willing wife slaves and drudges like a London cabhorse, and changes with hideous rapidity from a young to an old woman, over the daily task in all weathers. His children toil more than is good for the straightening of young backs and the shapeliness of tender limbs, in the service of that Moloch A of a farm. Up at earliest dawn, busy till dark night, scraping and haggling, pinching and saving, the whole family struggle on, spending as little as they can, making the most possible to them. But, "sic vos non vobis," might be the motto of the French peasantry. These folks poor practise the severest self-denial, and display an almost heroic courage as workers, for the emolument, less of themselves, than of the notary. Of the notary or of "his friend in the city," who found the exorbitant purchase money for the meadows beside the brook, who lent wherewith to buy the cows, and the horse to replace old Quatreblanes when he fell lame, and who advanced the portion of the married daughter established in the nearest town as a petty shopkeeper. The interest is high, but then Monsieur Deslunettes gently deplores that his invisible client exacts a large return for the cash lent, and money, as the peasant very well knows, is scarce. So Jacques goes home, and works furiously, and lives as hard as he works, under the spur of his fierce land-hunger, and loves the barren soil which he could sell, and well, to-morrow, only that he prefers to toil on, and so much the better for canny, comfortable Monsieur Deslunettes. A very scrupulous person, with a lively imagination, might follow with much curiosity and with The rosy colour tinged the mountains' brown; Wooed to a passing blush the yew-trees' frown. OLD STORIES RE-TOLD. THE ESCAPES OF A JACOBITE. AMONG all those brave and unfortunate men who fled from Culloden, on the defeat of the Pretender's army, not one experienced stranger adventures than the Chevalier de Johnstone. This gentleman, the son of an Edinburgh merchant, and brother-in-law to Lord Rollo, had been one of the first Lowland gentlemen who joined the prince's standard, and his friend Macdonald, of Scothouse, fell dead at his side at Culloden, at the very moment when the flight became general. Motionless for a time Johnstone remained, then in hot rage discharging his blunderbuss and pistols at the enemy, he turned to fly. He had left his servant and horses on an eminence six hundred yards behind the Highland left wing, but when he turned to see where they were, they were gone. The enemy was advancing very slowly, yet still redoubling their fire; he must now either run, throw away his life, or surrender. All at once he perceived a horse without a rider, about thirty paces distant. The chevalier advanced and took hold of the bridle, when he found it was held by a cowardly rascal who was lying on the ground feigning death. While the two were wrangling for the horse, young Finlay Cameron, one of Lochiel's officers, came up, and Johnstone begged him to reason with the obstinate fellow. Finlay, Finlay, a stalwart young Highlander, six feet high, at once presented his pistol, and threatening to blow out the man's brains, made him leave the horse and take to his heels. There was no time to lose, the English were not many minutes off. The chevalier, exhausted with wading through a marsh in his high boots, could not mount his horse. Again Finlay returned, and lifting him like a child, threw him on the animal, which at the same moment he struck. Then wishing his friend good fortune he bounded off, and in a moment was out of sight. Once safe in his stirrups, and out of reach of the dreadful infantry fire, the chevalier began naturally enough to think where he should seek repose. He quickly resolved on making for the castle of Mr. Grant of Rothiemurchus, which is situated in a valley on the banks of the Spey. Johnstone had been a frequent guest there. Grant had taken no part in the rebellion, and his eldest son, a schoolfellow of the chevalier, was in the service of King George. Moreover, when he left Rothiemurchus, Mr. Grant had embraced the young rebel soldier, and said: 66 My dear boy, should your affairs take an unfortunate turn, come straight to my house as a hiding-place, and I will answer for your safety with my life." A hundred paces on the road to Rothiemurchus, Johnstone, however, saw a body of English cavalry barring the way, so he took the road to Inverness. Presently, from an eminence, he observed that the bulk of the Highlanders were throwing themselves in the same direction, so he relinquished his project, struck across the fields, and got as far as possible from the enemy. Making along a footpath by the banks of the river Ness, just after he had heard some brisk firing northward, Johnstone met a Highlander from Inverness, who assured him that the whole road from Culloden to that town was covered with dead bodies, and that the streets were heaped with dead, as the bridge had instantly be come blocked. He at once resolved to ac company the Highlander to Fort Augustus, eight leagues off, a place the Pretender's army had partly destroyed some time before. They reached the fort at midnight, obtained, at a public-house, some oaten bread and whisky, and hay for the horse, and slept two or three hours on a bench by the fire, for there were no beds in the place. Before daybreak Johnstone hurried on twelve miles south of the Ness, and from thence to Ruthven, in Badenoch, only two leagues from Rothiemurchus. To his delight the little town had become a rendezvous for the Highlanders, who were eagerly waiting for the return of an aide-de-camp whom Lord George Murray had sent to the prince, wishing to be led to battle. But the terrible message soon came from the Pretender, "that every one must seek means of escape as well as he could." Johnstone then proceeded on to Killihuntly, the mansion of Mr. Gordon, with whom Lord and Lady Ogilvie were then staying. There he took a good meal, after all but fasting for forty hours, and slept eighteen hours without waking. The lady of the house offered him a refuge in the mountains, surrounded by beautiful glens, waterfalls, lakes, and woods; he was to have a lonely hut, with plenty of food and books, and a little flock of seven or eight sheep to look after. The spot was only a mile from the castle, near a trout stream, and she promised to often take a walk in that direction to see her shepherd. The chevalier was tempted by the kind and romantic offer, but resolved to first visit Rothiemurchus, and see if he could find means to embark to France. arriving there he found the elder Grant had gone to Inverness to pay court to the Duke of Cumberland, but young Grant advised surrender, saying Lord Balmerino had, by his advice, just given himself up. Johnstone also heard, to his indignation, that the cruel duke, after leaving the wounded Highlanders forty hours on the field, had sent detachments to put to death all who had survived the continual rains. On Gordon of Park, and Gordon of Abachie, two of the guests at Rothiemurchus, being bound for Banff, where Rollo, Johnstone's brother-in-law, was inspector of merchant ships, Johnstone resolved to accompany |