But it will be said—­What would be better?  What other system could there be?  We are so accustomed to a system of banking, dependent for its cardinal function on a single bank, that we can hardly conceive of any other.  But the natural system—­that which would have sprung up if Government had let banking alone—­is that of many banks of equal or not altogether unequal size.  In all other trades competition brings the traders to a rough approximate equality.  In cotton spinning, no single firm far and permanently outstrips the others.  There is no tendency to a monarchy in the cotton world; nor, where banking has been left free, is there any tendency to a monarchy in banking either.  In Manchester, in Liverpool, and all through England, we have a great number of banks, each with a business more or less good, but we have no single bank with any sort of predominance; nor is there any such bank in Scotland.  In the new world of Joint Stock Banks outside the Bank of England, we see much the same phenomenon.  One or more get for a time a better business than the others, but no single bank permanently obtains an unquestioned predominance.  None of them gets so much before the others that the others voluntarily place their reserves in its keeping.  A republic with many competitors of a size or sizes suitable to the business, is the constitution of every trade if left to itself, and of banking as much as any other.  A monarchy in any trade is a sign of some anomalous advantage, and of some intervention from without.

I shall be at once asked—­Do you propose a revolution?  Do you propose to abandon the one-reserve system, and create anew a many-reserve system?  My plain answer is that I do not propose it.  I know it would be childish.  Credit in business is like loyalty in Government.  You must take what you can find of it, and work with it if possible.  A theorist may easily map out a scheme of Government in which Queen Victoria could be dispensed with.  He may make a theory that, since we admit and we know that the House of Commons is the real sovereign, any other sovereign is superfluous; but for practical purposes, it is not even worth while to examine these arguments.  Queen Victoria is loyally obeyed—­without doubt, and without reasoning—­by millions of human beings.  If those millions began to argue, it would not be easy to persuade them to obey Queen Victoria, or anything else.  Effectual arguments to convince the people who need convincing are wanting.  Just so, an immense system of credit, founded on the Bank of England as its pivot and its basis, now exists.  The English people, and foreigners too, trust it implicitly.  Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone:  but what we have requires no proof.  The whole rests on an instinctive confidence generated by use and years.  Nothing would persuade the English people to abolish the Bank of England; and if some calamity swept it away, generations