ABSTRACT
Evidence of WALTER BAGEHOT, Esq., before the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Banks of Issue, 1875.
22nd July 1875.
7964. (Chairman) I think you are a Director of Stuckey's Bank? — I am.
7966. . . . Do you consider that it is desirable that there should be one single system of banking applied to the whole of the United Kingdom, or that there should be distinctions between the banking systems and the privileges given to bankers in different portions of the United Kingdom?—I should certainly think it desirable, if we were starting de novo, that there should be one uniform system. Probably there would hardly be two opinions
about it. If we were commencing in a new world, all banks, I suppose, should be put upon an equality, but I do not know how far that would be exactly possible under the present state of things. The Scotch system, and also the Irish system, are so extremely different from anything that prevails in England, that it would require almost a revolution to reduce them to an English level, or to raise us to the Scotch and Irish level, and I hardly know how it could be done.
