Perhaps a few illustrations of the relations between the banks and their clerks may prove interesting. I have in my mind the case of a man who sat by my side at a large branch bank in the North. From being a chief-clerk or accountant in the service, he had been reduced to £160 a year, and sent to the branch in question. The cost of living being expensive in a large city, he was compelled to send his children to the Board schools. In fact, he was so hard up that he wrote to the general managers telling them that he could not live on the salary, and asking them to increase it. He was told that, if he were not satisfied, he could take a year’s salary (I think it was) and go. The bank, however, ultimately succeeded in getting rid of him more cheaply. The man, who was a tailor’s tout and an insurance agent in his spare moments, did all in his power to add to his income; but at last he fell so low that he actually descended to taking money from the men’s coats. Then followed detection and dismissal. Now, who was the more to blame, the clerk or the bank? The clerk had informed the directors that he could not live upon his salary, and the directors made him an impossible offer, for the man, who must have been getting on for fifty, had been in the service from a boy, and was therefore not worth thirty shillings a week outside. Knowing this, the offer of the directors was frankly brutal, and losing hope the clerk became a petty thief. My ethics may be somewhat shaky, but were I on my trial for a harp and a halo I would rather stand in the thief’s place than in that of those directors. Another man in the same office, although single, could not acquire the art of living upon £160 a year, and after some few years of unsuccessful striving and vain endeavour, he was dismissed for drink and debt. He then became a traveller in the wine trade, and terminated his not uninteresting career by getting drunk on his samples. A third man, who was a married cashier, took two sovereigns from his till, intending to return them upon the following day, but his till-money was counted the very next morning by the accountant, who was probably suspicious, and the man had to go. Out of a staff of twenty-eight men, five, I think, were cashiered within five years; it seems to me that were a kinder spirit manifested by those in authority much of this misery and suffering might be spared.