as the
experience of the Post Office Savings Bank shows, no such shifting
of business would affect it; no mere transfers from firm to
firm or from trade to trade would involve any shrinking of its
aggregate balances; and it would need only to have in hand,
somewhere, sufficient currency to replenish temporarily a local
drain on its 'till money.' The nearer the banks can approach to
this condition of monopoly, not only the lower will be their
percentage of working expenses, but also the greater will be the
financial stability, and the smaller the amount that they will
need to keep uninvested in order to meet possible withdrawals.

"(b) That the process of amalgamation has involved an
ever-increasing elimination, from the British banking business, of
the typical profit-maker, first as partner in a private bank, then
as a director in a Joint Stock bank, representing a large personal
holding of shares; and the gradual transfer of practically the
whole conduct of the business to what may be called 'disinterested
management'--that is to say, management by trained, professional
officers serving for salaries, whose remuneration bears no
relation to the profit made on each piece of business transacted.
The part played in the business by the directors themselves seems
to be, with every increase in the magnitude and scope of the
concern, steadily diminishing; and these directors, moreover, come
to be chosen, more and more, not because of their large holdings
of shares, or because of their ancestral or personal connection
with banking, but because of their reputation or influence,
commercial, social or political. The result is that, along with
the process of amalgamation, there has been going on a transfer
of the whole management of banking to the hierarchy of salaried
officials; whilst the supreme decisions on financial policy are in
the hands, in practice, of a very small group of salaried general
managers, only partially in consultation with an equally small
group of chairmen of boards of directors, themselves usually
drawing not inconsiderable salaries."

It seems to me that Mr Webb exaggerates in rather a dangerous degree
the reduction, through amalgamation, of the necessity which obliges
a bank to keep a considerable reserve of cash. It is quite true that
under normal circumstances cash withdr