Summary and Conclusion

The waves of more than five centuries roll between the commutation of the feudal dues, with its resulting embryonic money-economy, and the emergence of the Inner Cabinet of British banking as the mind of a puissant financial organism, a hierarchy over other hierarchies. They have been five centuries of ceaseless evolution. “It is at least evident,” remarks Haldane, “that the extension of biological conceptions to the whole of Nature may be much nearer than seemed conceivable even a few years ago.” ¹ This essay will have been written in vain if it fail to convince its reader, even at the point which he has now reached, of the substantial validity of the argument for continuous development as connecting the lowest with the highest orders of being in the financial as well as in the biological world. What now remains is to survey, as succinctly and yet as adequately as may be, all that is involved in the scheme which we have seen unfolding, and to state what results may be postulated for it thus far. A retrospect of three centuries and a quarter carries us to the first definite statutory recognition of that differentiation and specialisation of function which marked the beginnings of complexity in the developing financial organism. We encounter the Broker, “Driver of Bar-gaynes,” and “Shyfter” in Tudor loan transactions. Homogeneity begins to vanish and heterogeneity takes its place. Interplay and interdependence begin, experience accumulates, and the rudiments of an organic tradition, leading to a keener circumspection and a unity of sentiment 683(already ripe and keen in the presence of peril), subtly reinforce the psychic equipment of the embryo organism. Though as yet almost unconscious of its own existence, it acts as an integrity in self-defence and self-preservation against royal or statutory aggression. It scans the environment and becomes more daring in the presence of conditions which it judges to be auspicious. This is the stage at which banking in the modern sense—the borrowing of money to lend it again, or to employ it as the basis of credit-creation—displays itself as an inchoate art. But although we may speak of finance, even at this stage, as an organism, we must remember that it is as yet only embryonic. It is so far incapable of the permanent coordination of its functions. There is a lack of that mysterious influence, living and moving behind the physical manifestations, which differentiates personality from mere existence.