Particular trades settle in particular districts, and the money they require must be sent to them from other districts. “Commerce is curiously conservative in its homes;” the steel trade concentrates in and around Pittsburg, the grain trade at Chicago, wholesale merchants in special lines are always to be found huddled together in our big cities in neighborly intimacy; and once a trade has settled in one spot it remains there. The millions that go West to pay the farmer must therefore go elsewhere to pay others as fast as a demand for money arises, because the price that will be paid for it elsewhere is greater than the price it will bring in the farmer’s pockets. This is doubly true because, as we have said, there are no imperious demands for money for commercial undertakings in the farmer’s neighborhood, and, even if there were, home enterprises are seldom attractive; curiously enough there is a familiarity about them and their local promoters that breeds contempt. Besides, these millions are scattered in small sums all over the agricultural States; there is no cohesion, no concentration. What then becomes of these vast sums? They are deposited in the local banks, and the local bankers, who are wisely permitted by law to deposit three fifths of their legal reserves in a city bank, promptly transfer the funds that are not required at home to the bank that will pay interest on them. In this way large capital accumulates, and when we say this is a wise provision of the law we mean that scattered reserves in local country banks are of no more avail in emergencies than the five-dollar bills in the people’s pockets; but, gathered into one great central fund that will aggregate a sum large enough to provide every solvent bank and business house with ample support in times of distress, they accomplish a purpose worth talking about. This is the way they do in Europe, but say “Central Bank” in America, and people are frightened out of their wits. They say politics would dominate it; “the interests” would control it. The bigness of things seems to paralyze them. But to attack a thing merely because it is big and powerful is no argument. In a country full of big things it does not ring true; it is un-American, and, as for the bogy of a centralized banking control, there is infinitely more of it in New York to-day, under the existing system, than there could possibly be under the plan proposed by the original Aldrich measure. However, the idea of a great Central Bank is not the subject under discussion.