mischievous supremacy above all other banks. The skill of a
financier in such an age is to equalise the receipt of taxation, and
the outgoing of expenditure; it should be a principal care with him
to make sure that more should not be locked up at a particular
moment in the Government coffers than is usually locked up there. If
the amount of dead capital so buried in the Treasury does not at any
time much exceed the common average, the evil so caused is
inconsiderable: it is only the loss of interest on a certain sum of
money, which would not be much of a burden on the whole nation; the
additional taxation it would cause would be inconsiderable. Such an
evil is nothing in comparison with that of losing the money
necessary for inevitable expence by entrusting it to a bad Bank, or
that of recovering this money by identifying the national credit
with the bad Bank and so propping it up and perpetuating it. So long
as the security of the Money Market is not entirely to be relied on,
the Goverment of a country had much better leave it to itself and
keep its own money. If the banks are bad, they will certainly
continue bad and will probably become worse if the Government
sustains and encourages them. The cardinal maxim is, that any aid to
a present bad Bank is the surest mode of preventing the
establishment of a future good Bank.

When the trade of Banking began to be better understood, when the
Banking system was thoroughly secure, the Government might begin to
lend gradually; especially to lend the unusually large sums which
even under the most equable system of finance will at times
accumulate in the public exchequer.

Under a natural system of banking it would have every facility.
Where there were many banks keeping their own reserve, and each most