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 securitystill 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 worldhas
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.

The earliest banks of Italy, where the name began, were finance