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 securitystill 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 worldhas 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.

The earliest banks of Italy, where the name began, were finance companies.  The Bank of St. George, at Genoa, and other banks founded in imitation of it, were at first only companies to make loans to, and float loans for, the Governments of the cities in which they were formed.  The want of money is an urgent want of Governments at most periods, and seldom more urgent than it was in the tumultuous Italian Republics of the Middle Ages.  After these banks had been long established, they began to do what we call banking business; but at first they never thought of it.  The great banks of the North of Europe had their origin in a want still more curious.  The notion of its being a prime business of a bank to give good coin has passed out of men’s memories; but wherever it is felt, there is no want of business more keen and urgent.  Adam Smith describes it so admirably that it would be stupid not to quote his words:—­’The currency of a great state, such as France or England, generally consists almost entirely of its own coin.  Should this currency, therefore, be at any time worn, clipt, or otherwise degraded below its standard value, the state by a reformation of its coin can effectually re-establish its currency.  But the currency of a small state, such as Genoa or Hamburgh, can seldom consist altogether in its own coin, but must be made up, in a great measure,