Excerpt from A Contribution to the Bibliography of the Bank of England A bibliography of the Bank is the more needed, as its history from the scientific standpoint of the Political Economist has yet to be written. Francis's History, an excellent work within its limits, deals with the subject rather from the popular point of view. Possibly, if any one endowed with the necessary qualifications for writing a full and exact history of the Bank of England, the literary Skill to deal with the vast mass of material, and the historical imagination to give it form and consistency, has ever contemplated the task, he may have been deterred by its magnitude, by the reflection that it must embrace a great deal of the commercial and most of the financial history of the country during more than two centuries. For the literature on the subject is enormous, and as the information it contains has never been collected and exhibited In a systematic form, it is the more necessary that a record of it should be preserved. The Bank has occupied a high position in national finance from its first establishment, and has had to pay the usual penalty of exalted station. It has been subjected to criticism of all kinds; there has been a tendency to exaggerate its shortcomings, real or imaginary, and a corresponding disposition to decry its merits. It has offered a ready mark to the average currency theorist, frequently a man of one idea, delighted to find fault, and recommending his particular panacea for all commercial evils. But the factors of a financial problem are often far too complex to be distinguishable by the average student, be he theorist or man of business, and the abuse lavished upon the Bank and the Barik system is in manv cases simply the result of ignorance. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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First Published in 1966. This volume the fourth edition of Andreades classic history of the bank of England that looks at the period of 1640 to 1903, with its first edition appearing in 1909. The reprint after more than thirty years after the author's death has now secured its place among the classics of economic literature.