If you take a country town in France, even now, you will not find any such system of banking as ours:  check-books are unknown, and money kept on running account by bankers is rare:  people store their money in a caisse at their houses.  Steady savings, which are waiting for investment and which are sure not to be soon wanted, may be lodged with bankers; but the common floating cash of the community is kept by the community themselves at home,—­they prefer to keep it so, and it would not answer a banker’s purpose to make expensive arrangements for keeping it otherwise.  If a “branch,” such as the National Provincial Bank opens in an English country town, were opened in a corresponding French one, it would not pay its expenses:  you could not get any sufficient number of Frenchmen to agree to put their money there.

And so it is in all countries not of British descent, though in various degrees.  Deposit banking is a very difficult thing to begin, because people do not like to let their money out of their sight; especially, do not like to let it out of sight without security; still more, cannot all at once agree on any single person to whom they are content to trust it unseen and unsecured.  Hypothetical history, which explains the past by what is simplest and commonest in the present, is in banking, as in most things, quite untrue.

The real history is very different.  New wants are mostly supplied by adaptation, not by creation or foundation; something having been created to satisfy an extreme want, it is used to satisfy less pressing wants or to supply additional conveniences.  On this account, political government, the oldest institution in the world, has been the hardest worked:  at the beginning of history, we find it doing everything which society wants done and forbidding everything which society does not wish done.  In trade, at present, the first commerce in a new place is a general shop, which, beginning with articles of real necessity, comes shortly to supply the oddest accumulation of petty comforts.  And the history of banking has been the same:  the first banks were not founded for our system of deposit banking, or for anything like it; they were founded for much more pressing reasons, and having been founded, they or copies from them were applied to our modern uses.

[Gives a sketch of banks started as finance companies to make or float government loans, and to give good coin; and sketches their function of remitting money.]

These are all uses other than those of deposit banking, which banks supplied that afterwards became in our English sense deposit banks:  by supplying these uses, they gained the credit that afterwards enabled them to gain a living as deposit banks; being trusted for one purpose, they came to be trusted for a purpose quite different,—­ultimately far more important, though at first less keenly pressing.  But these wants only affect a few persons, and therefore bring the bank under the notice of a few only.  The real introductory function which deposit banks at first perform is much more popular; and it is only when they can perform this most popular kind of business that deposit banking ever spreads quickly and extensively.