[William Ewart Gladstone and banking in the colonies, 1846.] Colonial Office printed circular dispatch, with printed set of ‘Regulations and Conditions’ regarding ‘Banking Companies’, for governors, legislative bodies and local authorities.

Both items are scarce: no copy of the first and only two copies of the second on OCLC WorldCat and JISC (at Manchester and Glasgow). Both are in good condition, lightly aged. Disbound from a volume and paginated in manuscript. ONE: Printed ‘Circular’ headed in manuscript ‘Banking Companies’, and dated from Downing Street, 30 May 1846. 1p, 8vo. Paginated in manuscript 67. Thirty-two lines of small print, in a copperplate font. At foot of the page (not in Gladstone’s hand): ‘/sd/ Grey [last word deleted] W. E. Gladstone’. The document explains that the Item Two constitutes a ‘modification’ of ‘certain Regulations’ Lord John Russell had transmitted on 4 May 1840. The regulations are not forwarded as ‘inflexible rules’, but the recipient is urged ‘to procure their introduction into any Bills which may be brought into the Legislature of the Colony under your Government, for the Incorporation of Banking Companies’. TWO: Printed ‘Regulations and conditions for the observance of which provision should be made in charters or legislative enactments relating to the incorporation of banking companies in the colonies’. 3pp, 8vo. Bifolium. Paginated in manuscript 69-71. Twenty regulation on the first two pages, with the third page carrying a ‘Form of Return referred to in Regulation No. 19.’ The ‘Regulations and conditions’ of which Item Two is a ‘modification’, with manuscript covering circular by Russell dated 4 May 1840, are offered together separately.