system, and try to reduce the demands on the Bank as much as we can.
The central machinery being inevitably frail, we should carefully
and as much as possible diminish the strain upon it.

But to explain these proposals, and to gain a full understanding of
many arguments that have been used, we must look more in detail at
the component parts of Lombard street, and at the curious set of
causes which have made it assume its present singular structure.






CHAPTER III.

How Lombard Street Came to Exist, and Why It Assumed Its Present
Form.





In the last century, a favourite 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