ABSTRACT
Although the modern money market dates only from Waterloo, its components had shaped themselves long before. By the year 1725 all the basic essentials of the modern financial mechanism were in being. The Bank of England had been founded: there was a banking community around it: there were localised share dealings, companies with assignable shares, negotiable instruments, the beginnings of insurance, and an increasing national trade to whet the financial ambition and offer a field for its exercise. But if all these factors had developed without any centralisation of control and responsibility, the inter-action of a mutual hostility must have prevented their attainment of the maximum scope and efficiency. To some extent, indeed, this sinister influence played an obstructive and disintegrating part, while finance was learning its business in the school of experience. Again and again, as we proceed, we shall have to witness the malign results of internecine strife, where there should only have been disciplined rivalry. The formative centripetal process is even now, in the twentieth century, not wholly complete ; but it has advanced far enough for the central sources of control to be plainly definable, and for their principles of operation to be analysed with clarity and accuracy. The gradual assumption, by organised finance, of the attraction, aggregation, guardianship, stimulation, and administration of the resources of the community was destined to place English banking in the forefront of the world, to consolidate the foundations of the cosmopolitan Money-Power, and to render it, in time, the dominant influence 198operative upon the progress of humanity. We have scrutinised and analysed the generative process by which the elements of this gigantic and prolific force came into being. What is to be done now is to trace the slow, but steady, formation, and then the advancing confidence and strength, of a central financial nucleus, and to indicate as clearly as may be how all the numerous economic forces and interests of modern society have grouped themselves round it.
