he gave me the information I required. It would
appear that Messrs. Blank and Blank, although
passing for men of almost unbounded wealth,
were often very hard pressed for money. They
did not like to make their wants known to
anyone, as, to do so, they would at once and for ever
ruin their credit. What they did, therefore,
was to employ as middleman my friend the
broker, who borrowed the money as if for
himself; but gave the security of those for whom
he really obtained the loan. I found that the
same little game had been carried on with
almost every bank and finance company in
London, and that whilst passing for a firm that
could command any sum it liked, they were, in
point of fact, obliged day by day to feed their
till with the money of others, borrowed in the
name of a third party.

But there were many who came to us direct,
and who, rather than let it be known that they
were in need of a few thousands, would have
pawned themselves, and sold their families into
slavery. Many of these were in our books;
although the full nature of the transactions
were known only to myself. I remember the
head of one of the most wealthy mercantile
firms coming to me one forenoon, and offering
to deposit with me the title-deeds of his estate,
which was worth some fifty or sixty thousand
pounds, and also to give me a private bill of
sale over his furniture, plate, pictures, carriages
and horses—worth at least ten thousand pounds
more—if I could let him have twenty thousand
pounds that day, and until the next mail from
India arrived. There being no danger whatever
in the transaction, I agreed to let him have the
money—in bills drawn by a third party, a man of
straw, and accepted by us—at once. The advance
was only wanted for about twenty days, yet I
charged him two per cent commission, and at
the rate of five per cent per annum. The loan
was worth any sum that could be named to him.
Had he not obtained it, the bills of his firm would
have been returned that evening, and the house
—of old standing and great respectability—
have been in the Gazette next day. As it was,
he was able to tide over the difficulty. By the
next mail from Bombay the expected remittances
came, he repaid the loan, and no one was a bit
the wiser of the touch-and-go danger he had
escaped.

But why, it will be asked, should not this
party have applied to his banker for an advance?
Would not that person have been the most natural
person to go to when in difficulty? To this I
reply, that, in these days of joint-stock banking,
no merchant who is at all on shaky ground
likes to apply to the manager of a bank for
an advance. In the commercial world, credit is
everything. If the manager of a bank at which
you keep your account knows you to be in
difficulties, he is, in a measure, obliged to inform
Messrs. Smith, Jones, Robinson, and Brown,
who are his directors and masters. When your
credit has been talked of in the bank parlour,
you are little better than a dead man. Besides,
do you suppose that Smith will not tell the story
—in confidence, of course—to his friend Wilson,
as they go home together on the knife-board of
the Clapham omnibus? Or, when Jones goes this
afternoon to the board meeting of the Grand
Junction of Mexico Railway Company, of which
he is a director, will he not mention what he
heard to-day at the Resistance Bank? Of
course he will; and your name will be "up,"
be talked about; your bills will not be
discounted readily, if at all; and, in a word, your
credit be shaken, which means gone. But why
not go to a private banker? It is not given
unto everybody to have private bankers, and
they, too, are often as difficult to deal with as
the manager of a joint-stock concern. In former
days it was different. Any man who could
show his private banker that he could pay
twenty shillings in the pound, was certain to be
helped to the very utmost of the security he
could offer, and very often beyond it. It is
still so with West-end and country bankers,
when noblemen, country gentlemen, or others
who have dealt long with them, and have real
security to offer, are in temporary troubles.
There are very few whose names are in the
Peerage, the Baronetage, or Burke's Landed
Gentry, but what have once or oftener in their
lives gone into Coutts's, Drummond's, or
Ransome's with an anxious careworn face, and come
out in a quarter of an hour looking quite jolly.
The best of men—the best in a pecuniary as
well as in a moral sense—may, and will, want
money until the end of time, and if they behave
honestly with those who lend it them, will be able
to borrow again and again. But in the present
day merchants don't much care to keep their
accounts with private bankers. The latter is
to the trader what a father confessor is to a
Roman Catholic, only that the latter is a good
deal more indulgent than the former. The
banker knows all that the merchant does, and
in these days of great commerce and great
overtrading, most men in a large way of business
divide their accounts, so that no one bank
need know all the risks they run in trade.
There are now few firms that don't patronise
more than one bank. If a house deals
exclusively with a private bank, you may take it for
granted that it does not put its hand out further
than it can draw back, and the head of the firm
is a steady-going, well-to-do individual, who
seldom wants to discount, and who sleeps easy at
night.

Finance companies are upon a different footing.
They are to commerce what the Jew
money-lending, West-end-living attorney is to
the Household Brigade. They charge high, run
greater risks, make greater profits, and keep
transactions they enter into much quieter than
the banks, either private or joint-stock. This is
one reason why they flourish so greatly. The
managing director of a finance and credit
company is everything, and does not even tell his
colleagues who are the parties that have borrowed
from their purse. So long as the securities he
holds are good, and are of greater amount than
the money he has lent, the other directors ask