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Rh If, then, the aggregate of the bankers' deposited reserve be £5,000,000, £3,000,000 of it will be lent by the Banking Department, and £2,000,000 will be kept in the till. In consequence, that £2,000,000 is all which is really held in actual cash as against the liabilities of the depositing banks. If Lombard Street were on a sudden thrown into liquidation, and made to pay as much as it could on the spot, that £2,000,000 would be all which the Bank of England could pay to the depositing banks, and consequently all, besides the small cash in the till, which those banks could on a sudden pay to the persons who have deposited with them.

We see then that the banking reserve of the Bank of England—some £10,000,000 on an average of years now, and formerly much less—is all which is held against the liabilities of Lombard Street; and if that were all, we might well be amazed at the immense development of our credit system—in plain English, at the immense amount of our debts payable on demand, and the smallness of the