ut while no such demonstrations
exist, and while the evidence which completely convinces one man seems
to another trifling and insufficient, let us recognize the plain
position of inevitable doubt; let us not be bigots with a doubt and
persecutors without a creed. We are beginning to see this, and we are
railed at for so beginning: but it is a great benefit, and it is to the
incessant prevalence of detective discussion that our doubts are due;
and much of that discussion is due to the long existence of a government
requiring constant debates, written and oral.

ORIGIN OF DEPOSIT BANKING

From 'Lombard Street'

In the last century, a favorite subject of literary ingenuity was
"conjectural history," as it was then called: upon grounds of
probability, a fictitious sketch was made of the possible origin of
things existing. If this kind of speculation were now applied to
banking, the natural and first idea would be that large systems of
deposit banking grew up in the early world just as they grow up now in
any large English colony. As soon as any such community becomes rich
enough to have much money, and compact enough to be able to lodge its
money in single banks, it at once begins so to do. English colonists do
not like the risk of keeping their money, and they wish to make an
interest on it; they carry from home the idea and the habit of banking,
and they take to it as soon as they can in their new world. Conjectural
history would be inclined to say that all banking began thus; but such
history is rarely of any value,--the basis of it is false. It assumes
that what works most easily when established is that which it would be
the most easy to establish, and that what seems simplest when familiar
would be most easily appreciated by the mind though unfamiliar; but
exactly the contrary is true,--many things which seem simple, and which
work well when firmly established, are very hard to establish among new
people and not very easy to explain to them. Deposit banking is of this
sort. Its essence is, that a very large number of persons agree to trust
a very few persons, or some one person: banking would not be a
profitable trade if bankers were not a small number, and depositors in
comparison an immense number. But to get a great number of persons to do
exactly the same thing is always very difficult, and nothing but a very
palpable necessity will make them on a sudden begin to do it; and there
is no such palpable necessit