They thus have two considerable advantages over their big brothers, the banks, whom they serve both as borrowers of surplus cash and providers of bills of exchange.
In the first place they have nothing to do with the queer old public and have not always to provide against its whims about the custody of its money. Their liability is not to thousands of depositors all over the country, but to a few banks and first-rate firms in the city or in the world of finance, from whom they borrow and from whom they can, more or less, rely on reasonable treatment in times of difficulty. Their chief asset is not, like that of the banks, a mass of advances to industrial, commercial and other customers, with exacting ideas about the extent and price of the credit that they ought to be granted, but a portfolio of bills of exchange, most of them accepted or endorsed by the British Government or by banks and accepting houses so eminent and respected that the "bank bills" which they create, for financing the trade of the world, are often quoted at a higher price than British Treasury bills, now that the latter are so enormously plentiful. Moreover, their assets, in bills and securities, being constantly used as pledges for advances, are subjected to continued scrutiny by lenders.
