THE BANKERS' MAGAZINE AND Journal of the Money Market. JANUARY, 1875. PRESTIGE, AND THE POSITION OF THE BANK OF PRESTIGE goes a long way in retaining, for any person or any institution, the position which it once has held. This is quite as true, perhaps more true in business, than in any other department of human life; and there are few other institutions for which prestige has done as much as it has done for the Bank of England. Prestige has enabled the Bank of England to retain a supremacy in the London Money Market, which it otherwise would long since have ceased to hold. At home, or abroad, in England, in the colonies, on the continent, the Bank meant the Bank of England without any doubt. Take, for example, a casual statement made by one of the best known of French financiers, Baron James de Rothschild, when giving his evidence before the great French commission of enquiry into monetary matters, the "Enquête sur les principes et les faits généraux qui regissent la circulation monétaire et fiduciaire" held in Paris just ten years ago, in 1865. Questioned about our Banking system, his remark about the Bank of England was this:-"Une véritable Banque c'est la Banque d'Angleterre, c'est de là qu'émanent, pour ainsi dire, toutes les autres petites banques." This observation, made by a man so eminent in his profession and so well informed as Baron James Rothschild, marks in a very striking way the opinions VOL. XX 1 |