But all that has been changed. The merchant in Chicago or St. Louis now buys his goods in Manchester or Paris and consigns them direct to his own city. The West reaches out over New York’s head and helps herself to whatever she wants in the Old World. So, too, with what she has to sell in Europe. A single rate is made from the western prairie to the dock at Liverpool. Wheat is rushed through without the intervention of any New York factor. As new towns and cities have sprung up in the interior, and new manufacturing centres have been established, and the mineral wealth of the country has been developed, the West has grown rich, and many of the banks in the interior now carry lines of deposit which would have seemed very large to the most important institutions in the East a few years ago. The increase in the number of “reserve cities” made by act of Congress two years ago was regarded at the time as destined to increase the amount of funds in the western banks at the expense of those on the coast. Up to that time there were but sixteen “reserve cities” in the United States. Each of these was required to keep on hand at all times, in loanable money, twenty-five per cent. of its deposits, while every bank outside of these cities was required to keep but fifteen per cent. of its deposits on hand. Any of these fifteen per cent. banks were permitted to keep three-fifths of this fifteen per cent. in the banks of any of the sixteen cities referred to, and any bank located in the reserve cities might keep, if it wished to do so, one-half of its loanable money reserved in the city of New York. The theory was that New York was the monetary centre of the country, and the other fifteen cities were the respective centres of the sections in which they were located. The law, moreover, made provision for counting, as a part of the required reserve, a portion of the balance which it was supposed the conditions of trade would require them to keep at the local centres, and at the general centre.