Читать книгу The Passing of the Idle Rich онлайн

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Let me put this a little more fully. For this, after all, is the great cause that explains so much that needs explanation in the structure of our social world, in the rules that govern it, and in the habits, deplorable or otherwise, which have fastened themselves upon it. Let me speak first of banking, for by profession I am a banker. To-day the English banker and the French banker follow, in the pursuit of business, paths beaten to smooth running by the feet of their ancestors. To-day you will find in the banking world of England and of France the same rules of personal conduct and personal honour, the same principles of business nursing and business repression that you would have found a century ago.

How different it is in this country! Through our early history, if you care to study it in detail, you would have found us pacing step by step the progress of England; but more than half a century ago, when this nation rejected as unsuited to its ideals the notion of a central bank, our ways divided in the banking world. From that day to this there has hardly been a single important step—until very recently—that has not carried us farther from the traditions of our English cousins. In the matter of currency, we stumbled blindly through a maze of ignorance, piling error upon error, plunging desperately from the early madness of wild-cat State currency into the preposterous and abnormal system which to-day threatens periodically the throttling of our commerce and the disruption of the business world.