bankers who kept the reserve, but they would not feel it more than the bankers. In each crisis the set of the storm would be determined by the cause which had excited it, but there would not be anything in the nature of bill broking to attract the advance of the alarm peculiarly to them. They would not be more likely to suffer than other persons; the only difference would be that when they did suffer, having no adequate reserve of their own, they would be obliged to ask the aid of others.
But under a one-reserve system of banking, the position of the bill brokers is much more singular and much more precarious. In fact, in Lombard Street, the principal depositors of the bill brokers are the bankers, whether of London, or of provincial England, or of Scotland, or Ireland. Such deposits are, in fact, a portion of the reserve of these bankers; they make an essential part of the sums which they have provided and laid by against a panic. Accordingly, in every panic these sums are sure to be called in from the bill brokers; they were wanted to be used by their owners in time of panic, and in time of panic they ask for them. "Perhaps it may be interesting," said Alderman Salomons, speaking on behalf of the London and Westminster Bank, after the panic of 1857, to the committee, "to know that, on November 11, we held discounted bills for brokers
