By old usage, the directors of the Bank of England cannot be themselves by trade bankers.  This is a relic of old times.  Every bank was supposed to be necessarily, more or less, in opposition to every other bankbanks in the same place to be especially in opposition.  In consequence, in London, no banker has a chance of being a Bank director, or would ever think of attempting to be one.  I am here speaking of bankers in the English sense, and in the sense that would surprise a foreigner.  One of the Rothschilds is on the Bank direction, and a foreigner would be apt to think that they were bankers if any one was.  But this only illustrates the essential difference between our English notions of banking and the continental.  Ours have attained a much fuller development than theirs.  Messrs. Rothschild are immense capitalists, having, doubtless, much borrowed money in their hands.  But they do not take 100 L. payable on demand, and pay it back in cheques of 5 L. each, and that is our English banking.  The borrowed money which they have is in large sums, borrowed for terms more or less long.  English bankers deal with an aggregate of small sums, all of which are repayable on short notice, or on demand.  And the way the two employ their money is different also.  A foreigner thinks ’an Exchange business’that is, the buying and selling bills on foreign countriesa main part of banking.  As I have explained, remittance is one of the subsidiary conveniences which early banks subserve before deposit banking begins.  But the mass of English country bankers only give bills on places in England or on London, and in London the principal remittance business has escaped out of the hands of the bankers.  Most of them would not know how to carry through a great ’Exchange operation,’ or to ‘bring home the returns.’  They would as soon think of turning silk merchants.  The Exchange trade is carried on by a small and special body of foreign bill-brokers, of whom Messrs. Rothschild are the greatest.  One of that firm may, therefore, well be on the Bank direction, notwithstanding the rule forbidding bankers to be there, for he and his family are not English bankers, either by the terms on which they borrow money, or the mode in which they employ it.  But as to bankers in the English sense of the word, the rule is rigid and absolute.  Not only no private banker is a director of the Bank of England, but no director of any joint stock bank would be allowed to become such.  The two situations would be taken to be incompatible.

The mass of the Bank directors are merchants of experience, employing a considerable capital in trades in which they have been brought up, and with which they are well acquainted.  Many of them have information as to the present course of trade, and as to the character and wealth of merchants, which is most valuable, or rather is all but invaluable, to the Bank.  Many of them, too, are quiet, serious men, who, by habit and nature, watch with some kind of care every kind