own
country. He will recall the meeting of the London board; the
difficulty of withdrawing its members even temporarily from their
country pursuits and their obvious anxiety to lose no time in
returning to them; most of them old men, many of them long retired
from business; some of them ex-Government officials and the like,
who have never been in business; a few ornamental titled persons;
only one or two here and there who have no train to catch and are
willing to discuss the matter in hand with attention, and, it may
be, with understanding.

"It would be idle to pretend that a board of this kind constitutes
anything like the nexus between industry and finance which obtains
in Germany, and which is very much to be desired in this country.
It may be that we do not pay our men enough. A London director has
to be content with an honorific position, a fee of a few hundred
pounds a year, and, it must be added, a very exiguous degree of
responsibility. That is not enough to attract men in the prime of
life with expert or technical knowledge of industry and finance,
who would have to submit to a reduction in the large incomes they
are earning by the exercise of their special abilities if they
were to accept a seat on the board of a bank. There are two things
which a good man, in the business sense of the term, will not
do without--pay and responsibility. Give him sufficient of the
former, and you may saddle him with as much of the latter as you
like. You may not always get good men by offering them good pay,
but you will certainly not get them without doing so. Apparently
shareholders are content so long as their profits are not reduced
by more than nominal directors' fees. At a recent meeting of a
bank with deposits of over L200,000,000 the proposal to increase
the directors' fees to L1000 a year was met by the rejoinder from
one of the shareholders present that he did not know what the
directors would do with such a sum.

"They manage these things differently in Germany. In the three
banks to which we have already referred, after payment by the
Deutsche Bank of 5 per cent. of the net profits to reserve, and
of the ordinary dividend of 6 per cent., and by the
Disconto-Gesellschaft and the Dresdner Bank of 4 per cent., the
directors receive respectively 7 per cent., 7-1/2 per ce