Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/75

 Rh confidence they had for so long past been placing in the solvency and integrity of Shortquill; and, besides, Shortquill was not a creditable manto trust or have any connection with. There were suspicions abroad of his having mixed himself up with a notorious scheme which would not bear the light. Pound proves to be right. Shortquill fails to meet his engagements, and being implicated with one or two well-known swindlers in the abduction of certain securities, in which he has illegally inserted his own name and then used them as a means of raising the wind, he takes the express train to Liverpool, where a steamer in which he has secured a berth is making ready for a transatlantic voyage. The whole affair was so clumsily executed, and Shortquill's character had been blown upon for so long, that, in spite of the losses sustained by Pound, Schilling, & Co., it is judged best to hush up the matter, lest customers and the public should take alarm at the rap (not downright blow) they had received, and show some uncomfortable feeling about the imprudence and simplicity of the bankers, and the danger arising from the disreputable company into which they had fallen.

The seeds of that frightful malady which must not be named exist, though not developed, in every bank in the world. Country gentlemen, with a regular income derived from rents, often go on in their expenditure like a wellmade clock. So many ticks—so many minutes—so many hours, and the circle of the day is completed. The banker knows pretty well how far the instalments of revenue will go, and how long the periodical sums paid in to the credit of the worthy squire will last, and all not likely to be wanted he appropriates to his own purposes. He provides on the same principle for the wants of his commercial clients. Now, bankers mean men who take charge of your money, and pay it all back again on demand. This they engage to do; but it is lucky they are so seldom asked to fulfil their promises, or this unhappy chronic condition would be inconveniently obvious. Of course, it is in the nature of the system. When I ceased to look upon bankers as magicians, I was at a loss what to think of them.

Statistics are not very easily to be got at, so much fluctuation and intricacy belong to monetary science. But it has been computed that in London alone money transactions are carried on through the medium of our bankers to the average amount of five millions every week-day in the year. In the entire United Kingdom we have a quarterly circulation of about nine millions, and this is divided among about 440 private and joint-stock banks. The amount held as deposits by the various houses throughout the country may be safely estimated at two hundred millions, at the least, and half of this is at call. Everybody knows that, as the bankers employ this money at a profit not only sufficient to cover the interest they allow the depositors but to transfer something over and above into their own coffers, they would be totally unable to return any considerable proportion of it at once, supposing a combined demand were made upon them: and this is just what is meant by a panic. Some pervading misgiving, mostly well founded, seizes upon the community with the force and suddenness of an electric shock. Then comes a run upon the banks. Money is demanded. But if our bankers had always an adequate sum in hand for meeting such a contingency, it would be far worse for them than shutting up shop altogether; for nobody could open a bank upon such terms. However, the result of all this is the stoppage which none may mention, and which appears to surprise the most reckless banker, as much as the weakest of a confiding public.And now comes the one shilling in the pound. All this I used to think, and I must acknowledge it now seems as if it had, a dash of Satanic agency in it. An unconcerted combination, so impetuous as to defy the restraints of every human influence, for the ruin alike of the bankers and the infatuated victims themselves among whom and for whose supposed interests it originated.

To understand the business of banking involves a certain amount of mathematical knowledge. Algebraical equations are necessary to give sums at simple and compound interest, at simple and compound discount; to show the relative profits of discounting long and short bills, and what may be made under all the complicated conditions of giving and taking, in which so much of monetary science consists. Although in practice, tables serve for supplying much of this information, according to the doctrine that every engineer should know something about the construction of his machine, the cashier, the ledger-clerk, or the Co., ought assuredly to have minds enlightened by some algebraic lore. A suspicion of this was of course a raison de plus, in my infancy, for holding the opinion I had conceived of banking; and I agreed with our forefathers in considering science of this sort and the cabalistic arts so closely allied, that a lighted faggot ought to be the discouraging prospect of all addicted to the pursuit of such wickedness. I have since discovered that inductive philosophy is at the root of all the mysteries, sorceries, and enchantments in which our bankers