ABSTRACT
The Baring crisis brought us within sight of recognised and acknowledged unity, involving both confederate action and conciliar deliberation. It exhibited council and coalition, employed as rapidly-grasped weapons to beat off a sudden onset. But this, the last and most impressive lesson in cohesion, did not share the fate of earlier admonitions. It served a deeper purpose than that of a mere transitory caution. Before its memory had ceased to be vivid in the minds of men the policy which it represented was entrusted to a permanent conciliar jurisdiction, vested in a body of bankers meeting at the Bank of England at the invitation, mirabile dictu, of the Bank itself. Within the brief space of seventy years the London and Westminster Bank was refused a drawing account at the Bank, and invited to share, within the very walls of the institution, in shaping the policy of the most tremendous economic prerogative in the experience of mankind.
