voices shouting out for refreshment, and all furnished with appetites-the legacy of a long sea voyage. After breakfast, and the greater mass of us hurry off to the post-office: the delivery has already commenced, and it is with no small difficulty that we manage to elbow ourselves within hailing reach of the solitary post-office clerk, who, luckily for himself, is barred off from the expectant multitude by strong iron bars, against which the foremost rank are mercilessly squeezed by the mob that hems them in on all sides. What a motley assemblage! What variety of costume and marvellous admixture of languages! Of a truth, that clerk needs be learned in tongues to comply with the urgent and angry demands of the many-headed applicants. Greeks and Armenians, Frenchmen, Maltese, Ionians, Germans and Hungarians, Poles, Copts, and Egyptians, Hebrews and Syrians, Italians, Americans, Englishmen, Arabs, and Turks, with a very fair sprinkling of Chinese and Indians. All these are awaiting letters of intrinsic importance to their several selves, and, being deeply imbued with selfishness, that great feeling of humanity, think it a crying sin and a shame that anybody should be served before themselves. Letters are demanded for Hadji Abdoolah, Prince Ptoleomowsky, Herr Vanderbutt, I Signorii Morssi Frutelli, Monsieur le Grande Tonnaire de Fontaigne, Alcibiades Cleophanes, Ramsawney Chitty, Ismail Rey, Jonathan Farcaster, and plain John Brown. Some of the names even our mental photography cannot possibly grasp; but, astonishing to say, that clerk knows them all, and quick as thought he flourishes them high up in the air, shouting out the proprietors. One hour of this hot and dusty work, and the Alexandrian mail has been delivered. Men, like modern Atlasses, labouring under piles of the Globe and other newspapers, are seen staggering across the square: everybody has an open letter in one hand, and his pockets and other hand crammed with papers and other letters; some of the houseless shipmasters who have migrated thus far from the sea-side on donkey back, and who are too anxious to know what the news from Poll is, make an easy chair of the nearest stone or the doubtful shade of the hedge round the Protestant church, and there and then devour every word in their letter-reading them over and over again until they have got the contents by heart, and then they make sail to the nearest refreshment room, where, item by item, the news is retailed for the benefit of each other, and some luckier individual, whose uncle has gone and died and left him a quarter share in a collier or the bewildering amount of fifty pounds, gets overpowered with pleasureable emotions, and stands treat of a dinner all round that day-to be

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partaken of, however, on board his own ship. Vastly different from these, oyster-like and secluded, with locked doors in his private office, sits the hawk-eyed weary merchant, mentally digesting by slow process letter after letter, and so cautious as to their contents that, after noting the chief items in a pocketbook, he locks them all under Chubb's patent in a fireproof safe. Even then he is not quite satisfied that the marked emotions of his face may not reveal to some notions of the important tidings of which he is the mental reservoir. So, just to cool himself a little, and better fit himself for the business on hand, he rings for a ponderous ledger, and sums up the various commissions chargeable or due; then balancing these he deducts the net profits, which are gratifying even to his sordid imagination. So being timed up for any exigency, he takes his hat and saunters down as far as the exchange, where there are scores of other merchants just as wise as himself. And for all the news a stranger might glean from their conversation, why, the mails might as well be at once abolished, and newspapers entirely put a stop to. "News! Oh, dear me no-you have had letters? Yes. Well, I suppose your friends know as much about what's going on as mine do. Oh, no-no news sir, the markets are as stale and flat as possible; the last sales of wheat were at 63 and 67, and the supply overpowering. Consols closed at 93. Coals no demand. Good morning, I'm really very busy." It would be madness to attempt to call upon any business man in the city today; or, indeed, until the steamer has gone again. One lunatic, a shoemaker, absolutely had the impudence to take round his bills during post interval, and the result was he was kept out of his money for six months. We got back to the hotel close upon the hour of noon, and we found the place in a more hideous commotion than when we left it. The railway starts for Cairo at precisely 1 p.m., and the passengers have a good half-hour's ride before them before they can get to the terminus: say nothing to the delay that may occur in booking themselves and their luggage. Consequently omnibuses and hack carriages, with a whole squadron of donkeys, are waiting at the door, and the passengers are swallowing a hurried lunch before their departure. Then comes the settling of bills and bacshish. A rabble upon the steps are disputing for portmanteaus and other baggage; the ladies are seated in the carriages with so many of the gentlemen as these can afford to accommodate, the rest bestriding donkeys-there is a flourishing of whips and shouting of donkey boys, a noisy exchange of hurried adieus; and two minutes afterwards we were left in utter solitudewaiters were clearing away the wreck of empty bottles and edibles: the landlord is chinking

his guineas into his strong box: a pack of hungry dogs are feeding upon the bones and offal thrown out; and, with this exception, there is hardly a sound to be be heard or a soul to be seen. Offices are all closed, and the inmates have betaken themselves home or to the nearest cafés for reposeand the afternoon siesta. By two o'clock the passengers and the mail are far away on their way towards Cairo; the arrival of the Indian mail has been telegraphed from Suez, and the rooms just vacated by the outward-bound passengers are being prepared and purified for those expected from India, who will arrive about midnight. In this interval there is barely any commotion or stir about the place, and the heat being intense we draw a chair near to the open window of our room, where the sea breeze blows in with welcome freshness, and whence we look out upon the arid plain, the stunted palms and minarets of Alexandria, and muse awhile on its past history and its faded greatness.

This, then, was the capital of Egypt during the reign of the Ptolemies!-a city founded by Alexander the Great. Here the Jews and Greeks formed colonies, and the former enjoyed the privileges of free citizens. Here, Tyre having fallen, trade and commerce was centralised, so that in process of time the place grew in extent, wealth, and population, inferior to none but Rome itself. Ptolemy Soter made this his residence, B.C. 304, founding an academy of learned men, termed the Museum; here his son Philadelphus pursued the designs of his father, and in the hands of the Romans the trade flourished, till luxury and licentiousness paved the way to its overthrow. Here came the Saracens, and the blighting hand of Islamism scorched up the very roots of civilisation, so that in the fifteenth century, when the passage by the Cape of Good Hope was discovered, its trade was removed almost entirely, and it crumbled away, like most Eastern cities, into a spectacle of mixed ruin and wretchedness; hovels interspersed with palaces, dust heaps and ruined walls mingled with stately minarets and palm trees. Here there were once four thousand palaces, four thousand baths, four thousand theatres twelve thousand shops, and forty thousand, tributary Jews, besides the far-famed library, which is said to have afforded six months precious fuel to the baths. What have we now before us-what do we feel or see to remind us of its past greatness? Is it the flies-they are certainly in thousands! Is it the fleas?-they are a countless generation! Is it the halfstarved dogs-they are as plentiful, no doubt, as the tributary Jews were. A couple of tired camel drivers napping side by side with their weary camels; a score of indolent donkey boys under the shade of a broken archway; an old

woman in tattered garments selling radishes; a man with a mule-load of stones, and an old Turk seated at his shop door, and reading drowsily the tattered pages of a very old Koran; a gentleman in the opposite house practising on a violin villainously out of tune. These constitute the architecture, the literature, the traffic, the nobles, the merchants, and the shopkeepers of the land. At least these are the only specimens of native growth that we can see from our windows. There is, doubtless, still an extensive traffic; doubtless princely merchants dwelling in princely mansions; but these are all exotics, Europeans who have settled here for the time. Remove these, and pull down the buildings they have erected, the streets they have constructed, the shipping they have drawn together, the store-houses and the granaries they have filled: I say remove these and Alexandria dwindles away into a poverty-stricken village, with hardly one man in a thousand that could at any call command ten pounds as a capital.

Notwithstanding this startling fact, this is still the identical spot where Grecian philosophy was engrafted upon the stock of ancient Oriental wisdom. This is still the Alexandria where, at a very early period of the Christian era, a Christian school of considerable eminence existed-supposed by St. Jerome to have existed from the time of St. Mark, and over which Plauteenus presided in the year 192, and where the extensive commerce with Palestine gave an easy entrance to the new religion. Here, in 415, there was a fierce persecution of the Jews by the patriarch Cyril; and here, at the present time of speaking, we see a modern patriarch of the Greek church passing under our window on a visit to some great man, preceded with silver-sticked cawasses, and followed by a train of humble priests. This was the native city of Apollos, and here we have abundant means of forming some faint conception of the terrible nature of the visitations that fell upon stiff-necked Pharoah and his people when there was no drinkable water in this hot and thirsty land-when the flies darkened the atmosphere, and loathsome frogs hopped about the king's chambers. Yes, my friend, this is still the same country, the same land, the same expanse of water stretching out before us, the same Alexandria founded 336 B.C., two thousand one hundred and ninety-one years ago.

But stop, there is somebody knocking at the door. Oh! and there's an old Hadgee singing out the Asser (four o'clock call to prayer); by these combined signals we may understand that dinner is waiting. After which, in the cool of the evening, we will, if you please, take a stroll in the Great-square, canter down to Pompey's pillar, and see what novelty or amusement we can pick up by these excursions.

THE Directors of the Bank of England on the 8th of last month raised their rate of discount to six per cent. On the 12th they advanced it to seven per cent.; on the 19th, they made another advance to eight per cent.

Consols, before the first of these changes, sold for 901. Upon the occurrence of the second alteration they were reduced to 87%, although, at the date of the third they had risen to 873, showing a fall of 24 to 21.

The alteration was equal to nearly twenty millions on the gross amount of the national debt. Railway property, and other shares, experienced a much larger fall. The reduction in the price of produce was also, we believe, equal to that sum. Altogether, the three movements represented a depression in property and shares of sixty millions. That depreciation was not realised. Everybody did not sell everything to some other person for some other article; and therefore the loss was not realised in hard cash; but those who have balanced their affairs realise it in figures.

The commercial currency of the country is generally represented as two hundred and fifty millions, or thereby. If we reckon the discounts at only twenty millions a month, the advance being two and a-half per cent. on the best of bills, the extra payment by acceptors, and the gain to discounters, on one month's transactions, assuming the average duration of bills to be three months, is one hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds; and this monthly tax will continue until the rate be again reduced; but five and a-half per cent is an unseemly minimum to start from, although that was the foundation on which these advances were built.

Eight per cent. has not been previously charged in the Bank of England for discounts since 1817. It was then only taken for one month, and led to the suspension of the Bank Charter Act, after many men had been ruined for ever. Very few

individuals who were engaged in commercial risks and transactions in 1847, can ever forget the pressure of that year.. Now, as then, we read in the journals of the bullionists that two or three per cent. can make no difference to solvent firms; and those that are unsound should be tripped up. The calculation has an important omission. The advance of discount is not more an evil in itself than the shadow of greater evil to come. It foretells a pressure for money at any price, and also the present want of money. Discount is raised at the Bank in order to prevent the withdrawal of money. For the same reason indifferent bills are rejected, and loans are reduced. Every commercial man knows the entire secret of turning the screw. The unsound houses give way, but without much inquiry why they become unsound. Many of them may have been richly solvent, until one correspondent after another slipped out of mercantile existence to begin the world afresh, until one disappointment after another compelled them to sacrifice goods much beneath their cost; and when to these losses was added the grand loss of winding-up in the most disadvantageous circumstances they were made shockingly unsound.

The rich do not become richer in a crisis, so much from the advance in the rate of discounts as from the stoppage of discounts, and the consequent gatherings out of wrecks. The storm enriches them at a terrible cost to the nation; but the causes of storms are still upheld by the nation.

All currency reformers admit that the present crisis arose in some measure out of the circle of our legislation. The Indian mutiny caused a disarrangement in our financial relations with the East. The astonishment on this subject is not that embarrassment should be experienced, but that it should be so small. As the cloud in the cast assumed blackness and darkness, another came up from the west. Affairs in the United States

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had evinced sickly symptoms for some time. months ago the monied people in that republic talked of straitened times. Gradually business became worse. Early in August one large monetary concern in Ohio closed its doors. Day by day afterwards other smaller establishments did just the same thing. Then it was discovered that many public companies had lived upon accounts doctored in a very vicious way. Creditors had drawn interests, and proprietors had received dividends, from works that had never made earnings, or had incomes very much beneath the sums distributed by them. The managers borrowed to pay dividends and interest, which were added to capital virtually. That adding to capital belongs to an objectionable phraseology. It means an addition to debt, or a subtraction from substance, and has no other reference to capital than its destruction. The creditors and shareholders of these companies did not examine the accounts with care so long as they received good returns. No way exists of cheating people so easily as by pretending to make fortunes for them. No matter whether the pretence be that of a gipsy woman, a Leeds herbalist, or a railway director, the capitalist is caught, or the right cook is netted, both by the same sweet delusion. The borrowing powers of the United States' companies appear to have been equal to their powers of catching loans. They were allowed to borrow while anybody remained willing to lend; and they might have gone on for the century if their servants had been honest in other matters; but before a secretary has learned to cook one account, it is probable that he may have been taught to cook another. Thus defalcations and deficiencies appeared in the States, as they have been discovered out of them. Their existence induced people who had money to examine statements and returns carefully before they parted with farther supplies. That was inconvenient, as a large portion of these companies' debts was afloat in short-dated bills and bonds. Their notes ceased to be met, and the bubbles burst-another technical term, meaning that the truth was told.

When these discoveries were made it was also found that a large part of the bonds and shares of the United States' companies was held in this country. The amount has been estimated at seventy to eighty millions sterling. Some of these investments are good, others bad, and a portion indifferent; but the lot at present is not worth more than one-fourth of its original value, and even upon that balance little or no dividend will be paid for some time. A large capital was thus at once thrust aside, and an annual payment of four to five millions ceased.

The dealers in the United States belonged to nearly all professions; we mean the dealers in these shares and stocks. The frenzy has been rather more general there, in the present year, than was here in 1845. Scrip has been eagerly sought at a premium. Shares have become the object of men and women's ambition. The mer

chants, who were the means of exchange between this and that country, were seized by the general epidemic. The retailers, who were their customers, fell into the plague. The farmers who bought from the retailers yielded to its influences. All the world, hastening to be rich, discovered suddenly that three-fourths of them were something worse than poor.

During the currency of September a number of banking companies stopped payment, accompanied by many commercial men. In the first week of October all the banks of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, and some other places, refused to pay their notes in bullion, and many more manufacturers and merchants closed. In the second week the banks of Boston and New York sus pended the payment of their notes in a hurricane of stoppages by other concerns. The crisis probably reached its climax from the 17th to the 21st October, and by the latter day the United States may be supposed, as a general fact, to have suspended payments in bullion.

An ingenious distinction is drawn between a stoppage and a suspension by bankers in the west. A man, or for that matter, a woman either, calls with a bundle of its notes at a bank, and asks cash. "Sir," or Ma'am," says the cashier, "we are suspended." "What's that?" asks the holder. Well, it's this; the managers have agreed not to pay notes for a while, yet." Then you are stopped, are you?" "No, not so bad as that, either; we're only suspended!" But isn't that stopped ?" "No, that it isn't, then, for we are open to pay deposits in our own notes." "And you are closed to pay these same notes, you are.” 'Well, I guess that same idea's a fact." "You cannot say when your suspension will stop." "Can't say, yet a while; may be one year, p'raps two-they say in Pennsylvania, three." "There's a rather disagreeable fix; will nobody give nothing for these suspended notes ?" and the obliging cashier directs the holder to the bank's friend, or his friend round the corner, or in the Shades, who knows all the circumstances, and buys at one-half, one-third, or one-fourth of par, as the case may be, and pays out of the bullion left in the coffers of the "institution."

A gentleman calls on the cashier to pay Birchem on Clyne, at three months, due that day, for one thousand. "Very good," says the offcial, "the dollars, if you please." "Here they are; run them over-you find a thousand." "Them's notes, however; and we throw out notes here." "May be, friend, but them's your own notes-all, and they're good here, I guess." "Well, and I guess not, friend, we're suspended." "You don't mean to say that you don't mean to take your promises to pay in pay ment of my promise to pay ?" "Just mean this, that for this here note of your'n, I wants one thousand dollars!" "And you can't get, and will want them, until you pass your'n notesthem due notes, there." "Then we protest, and

notes

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you're stopped." "And I protest, and your "That's another matter, friend; we're bankers, and we're suspended." "Well, this here is the strangest thing in creation; here are your notes that you can't pay, and you're suspended. Here's my note that I can't pay, because you won't pay, and I'm stopped." "That's as like the truth as can be drawn, friend; you bring bullion, or we'll protest."

In any civilised country the idea of a banker's suspension, without the order, or protection of the Government, would be considered the most outrageous course imaginable; unless in definite sus pension with closed doors; but the United States are over-civilised. They have gone a-head so fast that they have shot past civilisation, and must come back again. The commercial state of the Republic is without parallel or precedent in modern times. Famine has not swept over the land from destroyed harvests. Floods or frosts have not rendered the cotton fields a blank for the season. Labour is not pressed and squeezed in a corner to its last shift for life. Nothing more than man's extravagant errors and follies have destroyed its industry and wasted its property; for the United States are at present full of idle men and starving families.

Our currency laws and our legislature can have had no influence over these events, from which, naturally and necessarily, our manufacturers and merchants must have lost money. This may not even be altogether a true statement, but it is directly true. No laws, however perfect, can protect men from their own credulity and cupidity; but now, when one evil has been done, one series of losses have been incurred, our laws come and make them twain, or multiply them into many parts.

The goods sent from this country to the United States are to the extent of six millions, probably, not paid; to the extent of four never may be paid; but the gross amounts have been drawn for, and have to be refunded. The produce shipped to this country from the States has also been drawn upon, and unless our merchants are also generally obliged to stop payment, the bills will be met. Necessarily, therefore, bullion will be exported from this country, for this produce-however it be obtained, and almost at whatever cost.

In the States, as in all other countries during a panic, bargains may be obtained for money; and the exportation of bullion to realise a profit may be stopped by rendering the operation dearer than the business can repay; but its exportation to pay a debt is a different object, and one that, under any circumstances, will be effected. If, for example, a cotton planter in the United States sends forward his cotton direct to Liverpool or London, with orders to sell at the price which it will bring, and lodge the proceeds to his credit in the Bank of England, that Bank cannot refuse to pack and send him gold for the amount, even if the rate of discount were ten per cent. That rate may check

speculation, and even lower the price of produce but it cannot prevent the payment of debts.

The currency law renders our domestic circulation liable to derangements by events in any part of the wide, wide world. Our paper currency is a sensitive plant, shrinking before and sympathising with suffering in any district of the earth. This cosmopolitan currency is the worst that can be contrived for us, chiefly by reason of its cosmopolitanism.

The paper currency of England is based upon the credit of the old country banks, joint-stock and private, without any reference to their propertyif they have any property, which is not always true -upon the Government securities with the Bank of England, and the bullion in its vaults. The paper currency of Scotland is based, up to a fixed amount, on the credit, or property, of the several banking companies, and, above that amount, on bullion. The same regulations exist in Ireland.

When the Bank of England raised its discount to eight per cent. in 1817, its circulation was one and a-half millions beneath the authorised sum. That was the number of reserved notes on hand. When it adopted the same rate in 1857, its circulation was three and a-fourth millions under the point that it might have reached in accordance with law. That was the amount of its reserved notes. The Scotch and Irish banks had, probably, a similar reserve. The circulation was not pushed, therefore, to the fringes of the law. The reason is apparent. The Bank of England had private deposits amounting to eleven millions on the 17th ultimo. If they had been drawn for on the 19th to the extent of four millions, the Bank could not have paid them without selling Government securities. A margin of notes must always be reserved to cover a part of these responsibilities. The Scotch and Irish banks are compelled to take the same course.

The withdrawal of bullion from the Bank of England had proceeded for three weeks prior to the 19th at the rate of one hundred thousand pounds daily, over and above all its receipts. If this drain had continued for thirty-five-days longer the Bank would not have had a reserved noteexcept by reducing the amount of its private or public securities. The drain may be continuous for any evidence of an opposite character existing in public now; and if that be the case, the Bank must sell Government securities, or reduce its private securities by refusing to discount new paper as the old runs off.

This cumbersome law, maintained to secure the payment of the paper currency in bullion, would be quite powerless to effect that object in a panic; but in the meantime, it deprives bankers of free action. They must obey its directions, and they can no more regulate their own conduct than they can rule the seasons of the year.

The convertibility of a paper currency, as a fact, is as impossible as the payment on any given day of all the policies on lives insured in this country.