These exceedingly satisfactory results have been obtained by the National Bank by means of a nominal capital of £9,680,000. We use the phrase “nominal capital” with intention, for although this sum figures on the balance-sheets of the bank, we must remember that in this capital are included State bonds, which would have furnished, had they been negotiated, an available sum of £3,212,000 in paper-money, and that the net profits of the year 1908 are also included, amounting to £644,036 in paper, which by law must go to increase the “Capital and Reserve Funds.” The two accounts, after the deduction of the sums accruing to them as profit, amount respectively to £9,697,946 in paper-money and £1,303,248 in gold. It follows from this that if the _Banco del Nacion_, instead of being an official institution, were an ordinary bank, it would have been able to pay its shareholders a dividend of 10 per cent. upon its paid-up shares. The data we have just given prove abundantly that the Bank of the Nation has been directed by a hand as firm as it is prudent, and there is every reason to suppose that it will continue in the future to serve public and private interests as well as it does to-day. The forecast we predicted in the first edition of this book will have proved mistaken; a forecast based upon the authoritative opinion of an eminent Argentine statesman, who affirmed that the official banks “bore within them the germs of the moral and financial ruin of the country.” He even added that one should never “incorporate a bank with the political administration of a State, because sooner or later it will be used as a political weapon.” We must here pay our respects to the memory of Dr Ramon Santamarina, a former president of the Administrative Council of this establishment, whose premature death was a great loss to the bank and to the country. It is, indeed, to his intelligent and circumspect management of affairs that we owe a great measure of the happy results obtained. _The Bank of the Province of Buenos Ayres._——There is in the Argentine another important financial house: the _Banco de la Provincia de Buenos-Aires_, which has lately re-arisen from its ashes, by the aid of the _Banco del Comercio Hispano-Americano_. This also was a victim of all kinds of abuses, committed to its detriment, by the administrations which successively directed it.