isplacing the specie, and even in some degree the local currency
of England. Such an interference with the system established for
England would be a manifest and gross injustice to the bankers of
this part of the empire. If it should take place, and it should
be found impossible to frame a law consistent with sound and just
principles of legislation, effectually restricting the
circulation of Scotch notes within the limits of Scotland, there
will be, in the opinion of your committee, no alternative but the
extension to Scotland of the principle which the legislature has
determined to apply to this country.

"The other circumstances to which your committee meant to refer,
as bearing materially upon their present decision, will arise in
the event of a considerable increase in the crime of forgery.
Your committee called for returns of the number of prosecutions
and convictions for forgery, and the offence of passing forged
notes, during the last twenty years in Scotland, which returns
will be found in the appendix. There appears to have been, during
that period, no prosecutions for the crime of forgery; to have
been eighty-six prosecutions for the offence of issuing forged
promissory notes--fifty-two convictions; and eight instances in
which the capital sentence of the law has been carried into
effect."

This may, on the whole, be considered as an impartial report; and, as
it is as well in every case to disencumber a question from
specialties, we shall state here that experience has since shown that
there has been no tendency whatever to the introduction of Scottish
notes into England. With regard to the other special point referred to
by the committee--that of forgery--such a thing as a forged bank-note
is now unknown in Scotland. The evidence taken before the last
committee on banks of issue in 1841, established the fact, that since
the improved steel plates were brought into general use, there has
never been a forgery of a note. Such being the case, it is unnecessary
here to dispute the wisdom of that policy which would leave a great
national institution at the mercy of a single forger. The experience
of this last month alone might show how wretchedly that test would
operate if applied even to the Bank of England.

Setting these specialties aside, the only possibly grounds which this
committee saw for any future l