y in banking.

If you take a country town in France, even now, you will not find any
such system of banking as ours: check-books are unknown, and money kept
on running account by bankers is rare: people store their money in a
_caisse_ at their houses. Steady savings, which are waiting for
investment and which are sure not to be soon wanted, may be lodged with
bankers; but the common floating cash of the community is kept by the
community themselves at home,--they prefer to keep it so, and it would
not answer a banker's purpose to make expensive arrangements for keeping
it otherwise. If a "branch," such as the National Provincial Bank opens
in an English country town, were opened in a corresponding French one,
it would not pay its expenses: you could not get any sufficient number
of Frenchmen to agree to put their money there.

And so it is in all countries not of British descent, though in various
degrees. Deposit banking is a very difficult thing to begin, because
people do not like to let their money out of their sight; especially, do
not like to let it out of sight without security; still more, cannot all
at once agree on any single person to whom they are content to trust it
unseen and unsecured. Hypothetical history, which explains the past by
what is simplest and commonest in the present, is in banking, as in most
things, quite untrue.

The real history is very different. New wants are mostly supplied by
adaptation, not by creation or foundation; something having been created
to satisfy an extreme want, it is used to satisfy less pressing wants or
to supply additional conveniences. On this account, political
government, the oldest institution in the world, has been the hardest
worked: at the beginning of history, we find it doing everything which
society wants done and forbidding everything which society does _not_
wish done. In trade, at present, the first commerce in a new place is a
general shop, which, beginning with articles of real necessity, comes
shortly to supply the oddest accumulation of petty comforts. And the
history of banking has been the same: the first banks were not founded
for our system of deposit banking, or for anything like it; they were
founded for much more pressing reasons, and having been founded, they or
copies from them were applied to our modern uses.

[Gives a sketch of banks started as finance companies to make or float
government loans, and to give good coin; and sketches their