The Parliamentary Committee on the Commercial Crisis.

On the 7th March, 1811, a committee of the House on Commercial Credit reported. They attributed the crisis to overtrading, failure of South American speculations, and also to the warehousing system. A meeting of merchants in London passed resolutions to the effect that the crisis was mainly due to storing a large stock of goods in bond which the warehousing system had encouraged. The wealth and credit of England thus seemed to them to have caused its calamity. It was proposed in Parliament to issue six millions of Exchequer bills in loans to merchants and manufacturers, to enable them to tide over the crisis. Those who favored this plan adopted the above explanation of the crisis, though nobody explained how the colonial producers had forced Englishmen to carry their stocks for them while the continent was closed. The opponents urged that the currency was really redundant and was the favoring circumstance of the speculation, and that the issue of Exchequer bills would cause further expansion and enhance the difficulty The bill was passed, but only two millions were ever taken up.