iginal amount. As
before stated, the customer's dealings with the pass-book cannot, in the
present state of the authorities, be relied on as debarring him from
disputing unauthorized payments appearing therein.

[Sidenote: Custody of valuables.]

The payment of bills accepted payable at the bank is not, like the payment
of cheques, an essential obligation of the banker, and the risk involved is
enhanced by the fact that the banker must pay or refuse payment at once, no
interval being allowed for verification of endorsements. The abolition or
modification of the practice has frequently been advocated, but it is one
of the facilities which competition compels bankers to extend to their
customers. On the same basis stands the receipt of a customer's valuables
for safe custody. The question of the banker's responsibility for the loss
of goods so deposited with him was raised, but not decided, in an action
brought by Mrs Langtry against the Union Bank of London in 1896. Certain
jewels belonging to her had been delivered up by the bank to an
unauthorized person on a forged order. The case was settled; but bankers
being desirous to ascertain their real position, many legal opinions were
taken on the point, and after consideration of these, the Central
Association of Bankers issued a memorandum, in which they stated that the
best legal opinion appeared to be that a distinction must be drawn between
cases in which valuables were by mistake delivered to the wrong person and
cases in which they were destroyed, lost, stolen or fraudulently
abstracted, whether by an officer of the bank or some other person. That in
the former case the question of negligence did not arise, the case being
one of wrongful conversion of the goods by a voluntary act for which the
bank was liable apart from any question of negligence. That, in the second
case, that of loss or theft, the banker, being a gratuitous bailee, would
only be liable if he had failed to use such care as an ordinary prudent man
would take of valuables of his own. The latter rule is practically that
laid down in _Giblin_ v. _MacMullen_, L.R. 2 P.C. 318, but in estimating
the amount of care to be taken by the banker, the nature of the goods, if
known or suspected, and the exceptional means of protection at the
disposition of bankers, such as strong-rooms, must be taken into
consideration. Methods of obviating both classes of risk by means of
special receipts have frequently been sugg