The Bank of the Nation came to birth at an extremely critical moment in the history of Argentine credit and finance. In 1890, after the double political and financial crisis which was then affecting the country, as a consequence of the errors and abuses committed by the Governments, at a time when all the official credit establishments in the country lay moribund, disorganised, and discredited, the Government of Signor Pellegrini, called in to inherit the confusion of that which had just fallen, found itself faced with terrific problems. It attempted to solve the banking problem by founding a new institution, to which it assigned a capital of 50,000,000 of piastres——£4,400,000——the shares to be offered for public subscription. To the subscribers it promised a certain intervention in the administration of the bank, at the same time reserving to the State the right of appointing the president, just as the French Government appoints the president of the Bank of France. In order as far as possible to guarantee the shareholders and the public against the errors and abuses which had formerly been so disastrous, it established certain restrictive rules in the charter of the new establishment. At another time there was much discussion as to whether the Government of Signor Pellegrini, whose patriotic intentions no one doubted, would not have done better to rescue the old _National Bank_, which was tottering amid the ruins of the crisis, and whose assets, administered by the new institution, might have given better results than did liquidation, thus saving the State much expense; but this question is no longer of immediate interest. As was only to be feared, the public, after the spectacle of such striking examples of the lamentable end to which official banks are liable in countries formed by the chances of immigration, and devoid of established traditions: wherein there exists no sanction for the suppression of undoubted abuses: the public, we shall see, regarded the new institution with mistrust, and abstained from buying shares. The Government, disappointed in its attempt, was compelled to replace the system of public subscription by an issue of notes, which explains why a purely official bank was created, instead of the mixed bank which had been proposed.