But lending is, nevertheless, its best expedient.

This is the method of making its money go the farthest, and of enabling it to get through the panic if anything will so enable it.

Making no loans as we have seen will ruin it; making large loans and stopping, as we have also seen, will ruin it.

The only safe plan for the Bank is the brave plan, to lend in a panic on every kind of current security, or every sort on which money is ordinarily and usually lent.

This policy may not save the Bank; but if it do not, nothing will save it.
If we examine the manner in which the Bank of England has fulfilled these duties, we shall find, as we found before, that the true principle has never been grasped; that the policy has been inconsistent; that, though the policy has much improved, there still remain important particulars in which it might be better than it is.
The first panic of which it is necessary here to speak, is that of 1825: I hardly think we should derive much instruction from those of 1793 and 1797; the world has changed too much since; and during the long period of inconvertible currency from 1797 to 1819, the problems to be solved were altogether different from our present ones.