First, the London bankers should not be altogether excluded from the court of directors.  The old idea, as I have explained, was that the London bankers were the competitors of the Bank of England, and would hurt it if they could.  But now the London bankers have another relation to the Bank which did not then exist, and was not then imagined.  Among private people they are the principal depositors in the Bank; they are therefore particularly interested in its stability; they are especially interested in the maintenance of a good banking reserve, for their own credit and the safety of their large deposits depend on it.  And they can bring to the court of directors an experience of banking itself, got outside the Bank of England, which none of the present directors possess, for they have learned all they know of banking at the Bank itself.  There was also an old notion that the secrets of the Bank would be divulged if they were imparted to bankers.  But probably bankers are better trained to silence and secrecy than most people.  And there is only a thin partition now between the bankers and the secrets of the Bank.  Only lately a firm failed of which one partner was a director of the London and Westminster Bank, and another a director of the Bank of England.  Who can define or class the confidential communications of such persons under such circumstances?

As I observed before, the line drawn at present against bankers is very technical and exclusively English.  According to continental ideas, Messrs. Rothschild are bankers, if any one is a banker.  But the house of Rothschild is represented on the Bank direction.  And it is most desirable that it should be represented, for members of that firm can give if they choose confidential information of great value to the Bank.  But, nevertheless, the objection which is urged against English bankers is at least equally applicable to these foreign bankers.  They have, or may have, at certain periods an interest opposite to the policy of the Bank.  As the greatest Exchange dealers, they may wish to export gold just when the Bank of England is raising its rate of interest to prevent anyone from exporting gold.  The vote of a great Exchange dealer might be objected to for plausible reasons of contrary interest, if any such reasons were worth regarding.  But in fact the particular interest of single directors is not to be regarded; almost all directors who bring special information labour under a suspicion of interest; they can only have acquired that information in present business, and such business may very possibly be affected for good or evil by the policy of the Bank.  But you must not on this account seal up the Bank hermetically against living information; you must make a fair body of directors upon the whole, and trust that the bias of some individual interests will disappear and be lost in the whole.  And if this is to be the guiding principle, it is not consistent to exclude English bankers from the court.