These critics lay it down as a first principle that a bank must have adequate gold reserves. If they do not have adequate gold reserves they put too great a strain upon the credit structure. But they cannot agree, they cannot even dogmatize, as to what an adequate reserve is. Yet the banks are adjured to give all the help they can to the trade and commerce of the country. If they refuse that help they come in for severe condemnation. They are condemned by the academic critics and they are criticized by the traders and criticized by their shareholders, and had not nature fortunately given bank managers very thick skins--which thicken daily in the environment in which they live--they would be deserving objects of commiseration. As it is, no one pities them, and in time they become accustomed to an atmosphere unwarmed by mercy. I have, indeed, met people who regard bank managers as little removed from callous brutes, men utterly indifferent to the appeals of those seeking to make their bit in a highly civilized community. After all, the lot of a banker, like a policeman’s, is a hard one, and he is very roughly handled at times by friend and foe alike: the friend beseeching him to look to his reserves, the foe caring for nothing so long as he can get his loan. Why does the friend beseech him always to have an adequate gold reserve? Because the hour may come, suddenly, swiftly, without warning, when the phlegmatic Britisher will be in the grip of madness. The man who has calmly and resolutely faced the greatest crisis in his life; the man who has laughed at Zeppelins and air craft, whose courage has risen with his danger, is in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, to lose his reason and go amok amongst the banks of the country, smashing everything in ungovernable fury. There will be no restraining him in that mad hour. No force will be powerful enough to bind him. He will wreck, and the populace will gaze on helplessly, until all are buried beneath the ruins of a once beautiful and mighty fabric. It is because we fear this mad Samson will pull down the pillars, that we would make those pillars too strong even for his mighty strength. He would strain himself against them in vain. They would defy even the supernatural strength of madness. It is feared that the reserves will not be large enough to meet an outbreak of panic. As the banks are bound by law to repay deposits in gold, or legal tender, if they have insufficient gold or legal tender, they will come to smash. And if one great bank falls, all will fall. The mighty structure will then be a heap of ruins.