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 an intelligent Press to expound to its readers the meaning of the Bank return.

Whether justified or no, this reticence of the banks concerning the details of their business is not helpful to those who are considering investment in their shares. Combined with the mystery which the possession of large hidden reserves enables them to throw over the process of meeting losses, it gives the whole business an appearance of easily earned and regularly accruing profits and so whets the appetite of those reformers who want to nationalize the banks, and think that their job is so simple that even a Government office could do it. It is true that Mr. Sidney Webb, when he put forward a scheme for their nationalization in the Contemporary Review of July, 1918, proposed that the most difficult part of banking, the lending of money to industry, should be left to "a series of financial concerns, whose business it should be to discount the bills and satisfy the requests for loans of those profit-makers who now appeal to the bankers." But younger enthusiasts have been more daring.

The possibility of nationalization is thus one which a doubting purchaser of bank shares