Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 2.djvu/70

68 merchants' bills at the like, or an higher rate of interest. Much about the same time they began to receive the rents of gentlemen's estates remitted to town, and to allow them and others who put cash into their hands some interest for it, if it remained but for a single month in their hands, or even a lesser time. This was a great allurement for people to put their money into their hands, which would bear interest till the day they wanted it. And they could also draw it out by one hundred pounds, or fifty pounds, &c., at a time, as they wanted it, with infinitely less trouble than if they had lent it out on either real or personal security. The consequence was, that it quickly brought a great quantity of cash into their hands; so that the chief or greatest of them were now enabled to supply Cromwell with money in advance on the revenues, as his occasions required, upon great advantages to themselves." Here we have all the principal operations of our modern banks, including even some portion of the accommodation given by the Bank of England to the government in our day, described as already in use in the middle of the seventeenth century. No banking establishment, properly so called, however, like those already existing at Amsterdam and in several of the Italian States, was begun in England during the present period, although various projects of the kind were submitted both to the public and the parliament.

In 1652 the postage of letters in England was farmed or let by the state to John Manley, Esq., for 10,000l. a-year; and four years after the whole establishment of the Post Office was subjected to a revision and placed upon a more stable foundation than heretofore. In 1652 the number of hackney coaches licensed to ply in the streets of London was raised to two hundred, and in 1654 to three hundred, the government and regulation of them being placed in the court of aldermen. The old dread of the over-increase of the capital, however, still continued to haunt the legislature of the commonwealth as much as it had formerly done the court. An edict published in 1656 declares that "the great and excessive number of houses, edifices, outhouses, and cottages erected