USA > New Hampshire > History of New Hampshire, from its first discovery to the year 1830; with dissertations upon the rise of opinions and institutions, the growth of agriculture and manufactures, and the influence of leading families and distinguished men, to the year 1874; > Part 39
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"Turning over the old files of the Portsmouth Gazette, Keene Sentinel and
* The first press in Cambridge was set up in 1638. The first thing printed was the Free- man's Oath; the second an almanac, and in 1640 the Bay Psalm Book. The first press in Pennsylvania was established in 1656, four years after Penn's arrival. Presses appeared in the following order : in New York, 1693 ; at New London, Conn., 1709; at Newport, R. I., 1714; at Annapolis, Delaware, 1726; at Charleston, S. C., in 1730; at Newbern, N. C., 1757; at Savannah, Ga., 1762 ; in Maine in 1730. At the time of the Revolution there were about forty presses in the United States.
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Amherst Cabinet, you look in vain for the fierce invective, stinging person- ality, the tart reply and the dexterous argument of more recent journalism. Yet the press of sixty years ago was the product and reflection of its own times. It gave way to the hardier and more versatile journals as untutored labor yields to scientific skill. It left an unblemished name. It had hurt no man's feelings ; it had injured no man's reputation. Like the good Athenian it might claim for its epitaph, that no citizen had worn mourning on its ac. count. Pleasant be its memory !"
About fifty public journals are now published in New Hamp- shire. The wide-spread demand for information has called in the aid of science and invention to facilitate the art of printing. The presses used a century ago would now be a burden to the owner. The Columbian press, invented by George Clymer of Philadelphia, in 1818, was in its day an exceedingly valuable aid to printers. More recently the powerful cylinder presses con- structed by Richard M. Hoe of New York enable publishers to multiply books and papers as fast as the reading public demand them. "By the cylinder press, worked by steam, in connection with the stereotype process, as many as forty thousand impres- sions of a newspaper can be taken in an hour."
CHAPTER CVI.
BANKS.
Political economists find it a very difficult portion of their work to define such terms as Wealth, Value, Currency, Money, Credit and Capital. Whole volumes have been written on these words alone. Adam Smith's definition of wealth, as "the pro- duce of land and labor," is now repudiated ; for land itself is wealth. In the city of London, an acre of land varies in value from fifty thousand to ten millions of dollars, exclusive of build- ings. In the midland counties of England an oak, the natural growth of the soil, is sometimes worth three hundred dollars upon the stump. More recent authors, therefore, return to the oldest definition of wealth on record, as given by Aristotle. He says : "And we call wealth everything whose value is measured by money." The criterion of wealth is exchangeability. Any- . thing material or immaterial has value which can be bought and sold. Coined money alone has a permanent value, because it is exchangeable among all persons, at all times and in all places in the same country. "Gold and silver," says Burke, "represent the lasting conventional credit of mankind." Credit, in the
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form of debts due from individuals or corporations, has a com- mercial value, owing to the confidence or belief which business men entertain that the instruments of credit, notes and bills, may be exchanged for money or commodities. Paper money rests on the same basis ; with loss of confidence comes depreci- ation. "Credit," says Mr. Webster, is to money what money is to commodities ;" consequently credit is capital. Mr. Macleod says : "A banker is a trader who buys money, or money and debts, by creating other debts ;" and "banks are shops" where bankers do their business.
It has been the prevailing belief for centuries, that the word bank is derived from the Italian banco, a bench or table, because the Italian money dealers kept their money piled on benches or tables in the sight of customers ; and that a bankrupt was one whose bench was broken ("banco rotto") and the owner expelled from the fraternity. A very different etymology is now current. Muratori says that the Italian banca or banco is of Gothic origin. It comes from "banck," a heap or mound. This was metaphori- cally applied to a common fund formed by the contributions of a company. A bank, then, is literally "a pile of money." The Venetians called the forced loan made by the government to pay the public debt in 1171, a "Banco" or "Monte." The latter word is from the Latin "mons" a mountain. Writers in the 17th century use the "mons" for bank, as "Mons Negotionis," a bank of trade. The first bankers in Venice were two Jews, who obtained leave of the senate to deal in securities and A. D. 1400. The Bank of Venice dates only from 1587;
Mr. Macleod in his "Theory and Practice of Banking," says : "The business which is technically called banking seems to have been invented by the Romans. It is true that there were abund- ance of money dealers at Athens and other places, but their business seems, as far as we can discover, to have been more analogous to that of those persons we call money scriveners and bill-discounters than of those whom we call bankers." "The in- vention of bank notes is due to the Chinese, A. D. 807." The same author says that "banking, in the modern sense of that word, had no existence in England before the year 1640." Prior to that date, goldsmiths bought and sold promissory notes and bills of exchange on their own credit, doing business sometimes many fold greater than the value of their assets or capital.
Mr. Hamilton, in report on the expediency of establishing a national bank, gives the American theory of banking as fol- lows : "The following are among the principal advantages of a bank : First, the augmentation of the active or productive capi- tal of a country. It is a well-established fact that banks in good credit can circulate a far greater sum than
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the actual quantum of their capital in gold and silver. This faculty is produced in various ways : Ist, A great portion of the notes which are issued and pass current as cash are in- definitely suspended in circulation from the confidence which each holder has that he can at any moment turn them into gold and silver. 2d, Every loan which a bank makes is, in its first shape, a credit given to the borrower on its books, the amount of which it stands ready to pay, either in its own notes, or gold, or silver, at his option. But in a great number of cases no actual payment is made in either. * * * The same circumstances illustrate the truth of the position, that it is one of the proper- ties of banks to increase the active capital of a country.
* This additional employment given to money, and the faculty of a bank to lend and circulate a greater sum than the amount in coin, are, to all the purposes of trade and industry, an absolute increase of capital. Purchases and undertakings in general can be carried on by any given sum of bank paper as effectually as by an equal sum of gold and silver, and thus, by contributing to enlarge the mass of industrious and commercial enterprises, banks become nurseries of national wealth, a consequence as sat- isfactorily verified by experience as it is clearly deducible in theory."
The first bank in New Hampshire was established at Ports- mouth, in 1792, when the population of the state was estimated at one hundred and fifty-three thousand, four hundred and twenty-six. Its capital was one hundred and sixty thousand dol- lars. This sum was deemed adequate to the pecuniary demands of that age.
In 1863, with double the population of 1792, New Hampshire had fifty-two banks with an aggregate capital of $4,678,700 ; loans amounting to $8,742,668 and a circulation in bills of $4,- 192,434. The fictitious value of the bank credit of that day was nearly three times as great as the entire capital of all the banks. The business transactions in 1863, must have been a hundred fold greater than in 1792, with one half as many people.
In 1874 there were forty-three national banks in New Hamp- shire, with an aggregate capital of $5,315,000, with sixty-eight " savings banks," holding from 96,938 depositors, $30,214,585. These deposits alone, apart from the national banks, represent a business capital twenty times as large as the entire loans and bills of the banks fifty years ago.
What is the office of a Bank?
The above question was proposed to Hon. George B. Chandler, Cashier of the Amoskeag National Bank of Manchester ; and he returned the following answer :
"A bank is the agent through which balances in trade or com-
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merce are adjusted between one individual and another, one community and another or one country and another. In the early periods of the world, trade or commerce was carried on only upon the exchange or barter plan, one tribe or community parting with their superabundance, to receive their needs from the superabundance of a neighboring tribe or community, and any balance due was usually paid by giving from the flocks or herds of the fields. As people multiplied upon the face of the earth, this mode of conducting trade became too cumbersome ; so, after the discovery of the precious metals and stones and placing a value upon them, instead of paying a given number of sheep or oxen, a certain amount of gold, silver or precious stones was used; therefore the merchant was required to have grains or pieces of gold or silver about him, which, by the aid of balances or scales he paid to his creditor in satisfaction of demands against him.
The population and commerce of the world were so limited, that down to the time of Christ but little advance had been made upon this mode of effecting exchanges or paying balances, except that an impress had been put upon pieces of gold and silver, and a value-other than by weight-had been fixed upon each piece, so that instead of giving a certain weight, people could compute and pay a given sum or value in the same way it can be done to-day. In a preceding page you state that 'banks in the modern sense did not exist in England until 1640.' Up to about that time business had principally been done by transport- ing vast sums of gold and silver from one community or coun- try to another, and that people were considered most wealthy to whom gold was constantly being carried. But with the es- tablishment of the bank, a change was wrought in the manner of doing business, which has been constantly developing until the banking system of to-day stands forth a representative of wealth, enterprise, prosperity and success, and, is it too much to say, of the happiness of the people.
'What is the office of the bank ' of to-day ?
Ist. To concentrate capital in sufficient amounts to give the public confidence in its issues of paper, whether in the form of circulating notes or drafts of exchange. Under the existing national bank system, the community receives, and justly too (as each bank note has a deposit of government bonds behind it), the national bank note as the representative in value of the amount expressed upon its face. That the drafts of exchange issued by any well managed bank are good beyond a reasonable doubt is also true, as the entire capital of a bank must be lost before a loss can occur upon a bill of exchange drawn by it. In these days and in this country very few people realize the
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amount of business transacted-balances paid-by means of these 'Bank Drafts' or 'Bills of Exchange.'
2d. By having a concentrated capital it thereby guarantees to the business public in the midst of which it is located a safe place of deposit for their ready funds, and furnishes an agency whereon it may draw its checks and thus, again, do business , through another form of paper-the depositor's check upon his bank.
3d. By having a capital and deposit it is enabled to assist those who may at times wish to become borrowers, and, in cities where a bank has a prosperous and well-managed business with large deposits, it is not unusual to find one-half or two-thirds of its deposits represented by 'notes' or 'bills receivable' and still the bank has no trouble (except in times of panic) in paying all demands made by depositors.
Perhaps an illustration of the practical workings of a bank may serve to show that the great motive powers which enable this age to stand in bold relief above and in advance of all oth- ers are but few, and while the printing-press, railroad, steam- ship telegraph and postal system are constantly elevating, enlarg- ing, educating and encouraging our people, the 'banks' hold no second rank or questioned position as public benefactors.
See how the merchant of to-day transacts his business so far as his money is concerned. He is constantly exchanging his goods for paper representatives of value-bank notes. Before the close of bank hours each day he gathers up his paper money, deposits it in the bank (every merchant has a bank account), thus transferring his paper representatives of value into a credit upon the books of the bank. His great solicitude is to be able always to have a good credit in his bank. When bills fall due he pays them very easily by simply filling a check upon his bank for the amount of any demand against him, signing it, and among honorable dealers this evidence of a value in the bank is accepted as readily as are the strongest bank checks made by the largest dealers.
To-day in all large mercantile houses the total receipts of money pass into the hands of one person, 'the cashier, ' and are by him deposited in the bank to be drawn therefrom upon checks as above indicated. The practice prevails of merchants in the country paying the jobber in the large cities by sending his per- sonal check and requesting and receiving a receipted bill by return mail.
Another illustration, showing the part the bank performs in the business of to-day : A is a merchant in Manchester, B is a mil- ler in St. Louis ; No. I is a bank in St. Louis, No. 2 is a bank in Manchester, No. 3 is a bank in New York. A finds he wants a
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lot of XX flour at once. He accordingly on his way home at night sends B a telegraphic despatch for the same. Next morn- ing upon going to the mill in St. Louis, B finds the telegraphic order. Understanding the immediate necessity he soon has the flour on the way to the railway station for shipment. Within two hours it is loaded into a car and a receipt given ('Bill of Lading') stating that one hundred barrels of XX flour had been received to be shipped to A of Manchester, N. H. Upon re- ceipt of this bill of lading B returns to his office, makes a draft upon A at Manchester, attaches the bill of freight and with these documents repairs to his bank and requests draft to be forwarded without delay for collection. No. 1, the bank, credits miller B with the draft, saving only a small charge for expense of collec- tion, and during the day prepares his letter to No. 2, enclosing the draft with the request that it be collected and proceeds re- mitted to No. 3 in New York for credit of No. I. Night find both flour and draft on their way to Manchester, where draft will arrive in about thirty-six hours. No. 2 bank in Manchester, upon receiving it, at once sends messenger to A, who, knowing that the receipt accompanying the draft will hold the flour and save him from its loss, at once proceeds to draw his check against his bank deposit for amount, which No. 2 bank at once accepts, draws its own bill of exchange and remits to No. 3 in New York, as requested, for the credit of No. 1 in St. Louis. All this may be accomplished within about five days. The miller transfers his value from flour in his mill to a credit in his bank. The mer- chant transfers his bank balance into flour which he knows will reach him within a few days. The St. Louis bank becomes in- debted to the miller by the amount of his credit, but then again it has a credit in New York of a like amount, while the bank in Manchester pays its depositor, the merchant, by a transfer of the value of the flour from its correspondent in New York to No. 3, the correspondent of the St. Louis bank No. I. All this adjustment of balances is made without the moving of a dollar in value, only as it is done through the medium of 'paper ex- change.' The farmer exchanges his products, which have an in- trinsic value, for the paper representative-bank notes-with which he procures his needed supplies, makes for himself a credit in the bank, or exchanges again for lands, buildings, or other forms of value.
The man of leisure desiring to pass some time in a foreign country does not go loaded down with gold, but instead makes his deposit in some bank doing a foreign exchange business, receiving a letter of credit-nothing in fact but a paper repres- entative of his credit in the bank-and with this he is enabled to draw in almost any of the large cities of Europe such sums of
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gold as he may need from time to time to defray expenses and is not necessarily obliged to have gold to the extent of one hun- dred dollars about his person. This is but another form of trans- fer whereby the bank or banker in London, Paris or Berlin is enabled to make an advance upon a credit known to exist in a bank in America. We fail to comprehend how the present vol- ume of business of the country could possibly be transacted, except through the agency of the bank with the aid of its paper currency and exchange ; hence, as before remarked, we look 'upon the bank as one of the great promoters of the business and in- dustries of the people, and therefore among the most useful institutions of the day."
CHAPTER CVII.
MANUFACTURES, ANCIENT AND MODERN.
The genius of invention traveled a long way in descending from the summit of the pyramid of Cheops to the railroad that has been built at its base, upon the banks of the Nile. Looking backward along the track of by-gone ages, the distance is quite as great from the dome of St. Peters to the Egyptian obelisk that stands in the square before the church. When Augustus brought that monolith to Rome, it was then very old ; it is older now, and the events that have taken place under its shadow would constitute the larger portion of the world's history. The pyramid and the obelisk are monuments of power and oppres- sion ; the church and the railroad are symbols of progress and emancipation. It deserves notice that all the great works of antiquity were reared for show and not for use. They exalted the few and degraded the many. The creations of genius were all of the same character. "The ancient philosophers," says Macaulay, " did not neglect natural science ; but they did not cul- tivate it for the purpose of increasing the power and ameliorating the condition of man. The taint of barrenness has spread from ethical to physical speculations. Seneca wrote largely on nat- ural philosophy and magnified the importance of that study. But why? Not because it tended to assuage suffering, to multi- ply the conveniences of life, to extend the empire of man over the material world ; but solely because it tended to raise the mind above low cares, to separate it from the body, to exercise
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its subtlety in the solution of very obscure questions. Thus nat- ural philosophy was considered in the light merely of a mental exercise. It was made subsidiary to the art of disputation ; and it consequently proved altogether barren of useful discoveries."
This taste, pervading the minds and hearts of the philosophers of antiquity, promoted logic at the expense of physics ; and caus- ed the fine arts to take precedence of the useful. Comfort, in its modern sense, had no name to represent it in the classic tongues ; and was not admitted into modern lexicons till the in- ductive method of Bacon made utility the object of true science. To us, the narrow, unlighted, unventilated dormitories of the Greeks and Romans would be almost as repulsive as the cells of a prison or the "cribbed, cabined and confined" sleeping rooms of a Saratoga hotel. Their flowing dresses of undyed wool, except the purple robes of nobles and monarchs, would now be positively intolerable to business men. The Roman toga, the characteristic dress of the world's conquerors, was the very symbol of idleness. Says DeQuincey, "Just figure to yourself the picture of a hard-working man with horny hands, like our hedgers, ditchers, weavers and porters, setting to work on the high road in that vast sweeping robe, filling with a strong gale like the mainsail of a frigate." In fact slaves and common la- borers were not allowed to wear that badge of rank ; they wore the tunic, made like a farmer's long frock, and this was their only dress. The wealthy Romans were often carried by slaves in a lectica or litter resembling the oriental palanquin. They rode in carriages without springs, ate without knives and forks and lived in houses without glass or chimneys.
The choicest works of art in Rome to-day have been taken from the tombs of the Etruscans, whose origin is still an unsolved enigma. Some of the most interesting remains of this wonder- ful people have been disinterred by Lucien Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon the Great. About the year 1812, he purchased of the Pope the principality of Canino, from which he received his title of Prince of Canino. He proceeded to explore his newly acquired possessions and was very successful in his researches. "Some of the most superb vases in the world were excavated by him, besides gold and jeweled ornaments of the most exquisite workmanship, and bronze images, mirrors and utensils of great variety and beauty." These were sold to private collectors for various European museums. It is said that the Princess of Canino has appeared at the fêtes of ambassadors in Rome, with a parure of Etruscan jewelry which was the envy of every belle and excelled the chefs d'œuvres of Paris and Vienna, making the wearer literally the cynosure of all eyes.
To what strange mutations is even the kingdom of the dead
.
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subject ! The princesses of Etruria were consigned to their last resting places, more than three thousand years ago, with all the pomp and ceremony of regal woe. The state from its guarded coffers, or private affection from its hoarded treasures, conse- crated the most precious ornaments to the memory of the de- ceased. These were laid away in rock hewn sepulchres or in tombs built as if for eternity, of enduring masonry ; and their doors were closed against all the agencies which the violence or avarice of those times might employ. They remained hermeti- cally sealed for thousands of years, amid all the changes of states and kingdoms. Hostile armies marched over them. Peaceful peasants gathered successive harvests from the soil that was heaped upon them. No wild beast has found a cleft in the rock as a place of entrance. Not even a mole or a cricket had dis- turbed the repose of the royal sleepers. At length avarice, keen- scented avarice, like the bending willow in the hand of the ma- gician, seeking for living springs beneath the earth, inclines wist- fully toward the buried treasure which affection or pride in former years devoted to departed greatness. Rude laborers ply the spade and the pick to the yielding mound, till the iron clinks upon the ponderous roof. Violence wrests the heavy door from its hinges and the robbers enter and despoil the dead of their . ornaments. Modern princes lavish their money upon these antique works of art, and modern princesses rejoice to wear the decorations which have hung for centuries about the corpses of ladies of ancient regal lines whose names and genealogies have perished.
The Romans were not remarkable for their originality in any thing. The fine arts flourished among them by robbery ; the useful arts by necessity ; jurisprudence by experience ; literature by imitation ; religion by persecution. Inventions and discover- ies were rare; they were constant borrowers. They plundered the nations of the whole known world to adorn their ill-sited city. Their hoarded treasures, intellectual and material, which the Northern barbarians appropriated in the fifth century, re- mained unimproved for a thousand years. Even to this day in Southern Europe, the rude implements of husbandry and manufactures, used by the Romans in the days of Cato and Columella, are still in vogue. While modern institutions were slowly taking shape, the human mind rested and the world stood still !
In the middle ages the dialectics and metaphysics of Aristotle became mere logomachy, and words and forms instead of thought and reason occupied learned men. The mariner's compass was known but not used. The thermometer, barometer and telescope were not yet invented. Ship-building was a rude art and the
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geography of the sea was unwritten. Those great mechanical agencies which have augmented the power of man a thousand fold all belong to a later period. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the principal arts in use were those of the armorer and jeweler, the bead-maker and the costumer. The tourna- ment and hunting claimed the chief attention of knights ; needle work and confectionaries occupied the ladies ; while the wretched peasants retired to their smoky, unglazed hovels to munch their crusts of barley bread or gulp their homely pottage and retire to sleep on mud floors with a log for a pillow and a bed of coarse straw for a resting place. Human life was held very cheap, for seventy thousand thieves were hung in the reign of Henry VIII.
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