my
friends, and, pointing to the Bank of England, said: "Boys, you may
depend upon it, there is the softest spot in the world, and we could hit
the bank for a million as easy as rolling off a log." No response was
made at the time, and the casual remark was apparently forgotten. Well
for us if it had been.

The next day we went for a drive to Windsor, and were to dine at a
famous old roadside inn. On arriving we, of course, visited the castle,
and, while viewing the decorations in the stately throne room, Mac
stopped us with the remark that something I had said the day before had
been sticking in his mind. He went on to say that we wanted a hundred
thousand apiece in order to return home in good shape; that the Bank of
England had plenty to spare, and it was well for the lightning to strike
where the balances were heavy. The bank would never miss the money, and
he firmly believed the whole directorate of the fossil institution was
permeated with the dry rot of centuries. The managers were convinced
that their banking system was impregnable, and, as a consequence, it
would fall an easy victim, provided, as we suspected, the bank was
really managed by hereditary officials.

Here was a picture, indeed. Three American adventurers, two of them
barely past their majority, standing in the throne room of Windsor
Castle, and plotting to strike a blow at the money bags of the Bank of
England!

The idea grew on us rapidly. After dinner we sat in the twilight of that
old inn and discussed the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street from a point
of view from which she had probably never been discussed before. I can
imagine with what scorn the idiotically puffed and bepuffed magnates of
the bank would have regarded us had they known of our discussion.

They afterwards boasted to me, as they had boasted for a century, that
their system was perfect, and as a proof that it was so they widely
proclaimed they had not changed it in a hundred years. They had
proclaimed so loudly and so long its absolute invulnerability that they
not only believed it themselves, but all the world had come to believe
it as well. "Safe as the bank" was a proverb everywhere underlying the
English tongue.

In our discussion we speedily came to the conclusion that any system of
finance unchanged in detail for a century, belief in the perfection of
which was an article of faith not alone with the officials charged with
its management, but with the people of England