The permanent Governor ought to give his whole time to the business of the Bank.  He ought to be forbidden to engage in any other concern.  All the present directors, including the Governor and Deputy-Governor, are engaged in their own business, and it is very possible, indeed it must perpetually have happened, that their own business as merchants most occupied the minds of most of them just when it was most important that the business of the Bank should occupy them.  It is at a panic and just before a panic that the business of the Bank is most exacting and most engrossing.  But just at that time the business of most merchants must be unusually occupying and may be exceedingly critical.  By the present constitution of the Bank, the attention of its sole rulers is most apt to be diverted from the Bank’s affairs just when those affairs require that attention the most.  And the only remedy is the appointment of a permanent and influential man, who will have no business save that of the Bank, and who therefore presumably will attend most to it at the critical instant when attention is most required.  His mind, at any rate, will in a panic be free from pecuniary anxiety, whereas many, if not all, of the present directors must be incessantly thinking of their own affairs and unable to banish them from their minds.

The permanent Deputy-Governor must be a director and a man of fair position.  He must not have to say ‘Sir’ to the Governor.  There is no fair argument between an inferior who has to exhibit respect and a superior who has to receive respect.  The superior can always, and does mostly, refute the bad arguments of his inferior; but the inferior rarely ventures to try to refute the bad arguments of his superior.  And he still more rarely states his case effectually; he pauses, hesitates, does not use the best word or the most apt illustration, perhaps he uses a faulty illustration or a wrong word, and so fails because the superior immediately exposes him.  Important business can only be sufficiently discussed by persons who can say very much what they like very much as they like to one another.  The thought of the speaker should come out as it was in his mind, and not be hidden in respectful expressions or enfeebled by affected doubt.  What is wanted at the Bank is not a new clerk to the directors, they have excellent clerks of great experience nowbut a permanent equal to the directors, who shall be able to discuss on equal terms with them the business of the Bank, and have this advantage over them in discussion, that he has no other business than that of the Bank to think of.