His gold lay a
dead and useless stock, while paper was breeding paper on every side
of him. He suffered his share of those mortifications which every man
must look to endure who takes a course of his own, and stems a human
current. He sat somber and perplexed in his bank parlor, doing
nothing; his clerks mended pens in the office. The national calamity
so confidently predicted, and now so eagerly sighed for, came not.
In other words, Richard Hardie was a sagacious calculator, but not a
prophet; no man is till afterward, and then nine out of ten are. At
last he despaired of the national calamity ever coming at all. So
then, one dark November day, an event happened that proved him a
shrewd calculator of probabilities in the gross, and showed that the
records, of the past, "studied" instead of "skimmed," may in some
degree counterbalance youth and its narrow experience. Owing to the
foreign loans, there were a great many bills out against this country.
Some heavy ones were presented, and seven millions in gold taken out
of the Bank of England and sent abroad. This would have trickled back
by degrees; but the suddenness and magnitude of the drain alarmed the
bank directors for the safety of the bank, subject as it was by Mr.
Peel's bill to a vast demand for gold.
Up to this period, though they had amassed specie themselves, they had
rather fed the paper fever in the country at large, but now they began
to take a wide and serious view of the grave contingencies around
them.
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