prompted, as with us, by unprecedented expansions of the systems of
credit. A reference to the amount of banking capital and the issues of
paper credits put in circulation in Great Britain, by banks and in other
ways, during the years 1834, 1835, and 1836 will show an augmentation
of the paper currency there as much disproportioned to the real wants
of trade as in the United States. With this redundancy of the paper
currency there arose in that country also a spirit of adventurous
speculation embracing the whole range of human enterprise. Aid was
profusely given to projected improvements; large investments were
made in foreign stocks and loans; credits for goods were granted with
unbounded liberality to merchants in foreign countries, and all the
means of acquiring and employing credit were put in active operation and
extended in their effects to every department of business and to every
quarter of the globe. The reaction was proportioned in its violence
to the extraordinary character of the events which preceded it. The
commercial community of Great Britain were subjected to the greatest
difficulties, and their debtors in this country were not only suddenly
deprived of accustomed and expected credits, but called upon for
payments which in the actual posture of things here could only be made
through a general pressure and at the most ruinous sacrifices.

In view of these facts it would seem impossible for sincere inquirers
after truth to resist the conviction that the causes of the revulsion
in both countries have been substantially the same. Two nations, the
most commercial in the world, enjoying but recently the highest degree
of apparent prosperity and maintaining with each other the closest
relations, are suddenly, in a time of profound peace and without any
great national disaster, arrested in their career and plunged into a
state of embarrassment and distress. In both countries we have witnessed
the same redundancy of paper money and other facilities of credit;