our energies seem so much less than those of our fathers.  When we have a definite end in view, which we know we want and which we think we know how to obtain, we can act well enough:  the campaigns of our soldiers are as energetic as any campaigns ever were; the speculations of our merchants have greater promptitude, greater audacity, greater vigor than any such speculations ever had before.  In old times a few ideas got possession of men and communities, but this is happily now possible no longer:  we see how incomplete these old ideas were; how almost by chance one seized on one nation and another on another; how often one set of men have persecuted another set for opinions on subjects of which neither, we now perceive, knew anything.  It might be well if a greater number of effectual demonstrations existed among mankind:  but 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 necessity in banking.