must elapse before at all the same trust would be placed in any other equivalent.  A many-reserve system, if some miracle should put it down in Lombard Street, would seem monstrous there.  Nobody would understand it, or confide in it.  Credit is a power which may grow, but cannot be constructed.  Those who live under a great and firm system of credit must consider that if they break up that one they will never see another, for it will take years upon years to make a successor to it.

On this account, I do not suggest that we should return to a natural or many-reserve system of banking.  I should only incur useless ridicule if I did suggest it.  Nor can I propose that we should adopt the simple and straightforward expedient by which the French have extricated themselves from the same difficulty.  In France all banking rests on the Bank of France, even more than in England all rests on the Bank of England.  The Bank of France keeps the final banking reserve, and it keeps the currency reserve too.  But the State does not trust such a function to a board of merchants, named by shareholders.  The nation itself—­the Executive Government—­names the governor and deputy-governor of the Bank of France.  These officers have, indeed, beside them a council of ‘regents,’ or directors, named by the shareholders.  But they need not attend to that council unless they think fit; they are appointed to watch over the national interest, and, in so doing, they may disregard the murmurs of the ‘regents’ if they like.  And in theory, there is much to be said for this plan.  The keeping the single banking reserve being a national function, it is at least plausible to argue that Government should choose the functionaries.  No doubt such a political intervention is contrary to the sound economical doctrine that ‘banking is a trade, and only a trade.’  But Government forgot that doctrine when, by privileges and monopolies, it made a single bank predominant over all others, and established the one-reserve system.  As that system exists, a logical Frenchman consistently enough argues that the State should watch and manage it.  But no such plan would answer in England.  We have not been trained to care for logical sequence in our institutions, or rather we have been trained not to care for it.  And the practical result for which we do care would in this case be bad.  The governor of the Bank would be a high Parliamentary official, perhaps in the Cabinet, and would change as chance majorities and the strength of parties decide.  A trade peculiarly requiring consistency and special attainment would be managed by a shifting and untrained ruler.  In fact, the whole plan would seem to an Englishman of business palpably absurd; he would not consider it, he would not think it worth considering.  That it works fairly well in France, and that there are specious arguments of theory for it, would not be sufficient to his mind.

All such changes being out of the question, I can propose only three remedies.