The natural remedy would be to appoint a permanent Governor of the Bank.  Nor, as I have said, can there be much doubt that such was the intention of its founders.  All the old companies which have their beginning in the seventeenth century had the same constitution, and those of them which have lingered down to our time retain it.  The Hudson’s Bay Company, the South Sea Company, the East India Company, were all founded with a sort of sovereign executive, intended to be permanent, and intended to be efficient.  This is, indeed, the most natural mode of forming a company in the minds of those to whom companies are new.  Such persons will have always seen business transacted a good deal despotically; they will have learnt the value of prompt decision and of consistent policy; they will have often seen that business is best managed when those who are conducting it could scarcely justify the course they are pursuing by distinct argument which others could understand.  All ‘city’ people make their money by investments, for which there are often good argumentative reasons; but they would hardly ever be able, if required before a Parliamentary committee, to state those reasons.  They have become used to act on them without distinctly analysing them, and, in a monarchical way, with continued success only as a test of their goodness.  Naturally such persons, when proceeding to form a company, make it upon the model of that which they have been used to see successful.  They provide for the executive first and above all things.  How much this was in the minds of the founders of the Bank of England may be judged of by the name which they gave it.  Its corporate name is the ‘Governor and Company of the Bank of England.’  So important did the founders think the executive that they mentioned it distinctly, and mentioned it first.

And not only is this constitution of a company the most natural in the early days when companies were new, it is also that which experience has shown to be the most efficient now that companies have long been tried.  Great railway companies are managed upon no other.  Scarcely any instance of great success in a railway can be mentioned in which the chairman has not been an active and judicious man of business, constantly attending to the affairs of the company.  A thousand instances of railway disaster can be easily found in which the chairman was only a nominal heada nobleman, or something of that sort-chosen for show.  ‘Railway chairmanship’ has become a profession, so much is efficiency valued in it, and so indispensable has ability been found to be.  The plan of appointing a permanent ‘chairman’ at the Bank of England is strongly supported by much modern experience.

Nevertheless, I hesitate as to its expediency; at any rate, there are other plans which, for several reasons, should, I think, first be tried in preference.