BANKS OF CHINA.
(Continuation)
A FORMER "BANK OF CHINA"
We may be allowed, however, in justice to ourselves and to the impartiality of our views to assert on the threshold of the subject that apart from the concern we feel in all matters affecting the welfare and progress of commerce in its widest sense with this Empire, we are in no way whatever interested in the success or failure of the new Bank and that it is quite immaterial to us whether one or one hundred competitors enter the field against those who hold possession of it. We regard the question from the vantage ground of a supreme indifference to the share list, and a most shocking irreverence for Bankers and Bank balances—a lack of respect which we have not the least doubt, is reciprocated with the most utter contempt for us by those august personages.
It will be seen that the new Bank was being floated by Shanghai merchants: it leaves us wondering whether it did not, in fact, prove still-born. The style of the newspaper "boost" is of sufficient interest (giving some insight) to banking conditions in those days to give rather fully and will be continued in a further article.
BANKS OF CHINA (Continuation)
A FORMER "BANK OF CHINA"
(All Rights of Reproduction are Strictly Reserved)
We have seen from the previous article that efforts were made to found a new bank in Hongkong early in 1872 to be named the Bank of China. A press comment of the time stated:
"The assumption that the number of Banks already working out here meets the requirements of trade, we would maintain to be a false premiss. The statement contains more and less than the truth, the measure of which is apparent when we come to examine into the nature of the business which these numerous establishments carry on. If it had been put that for conducting the business of exchange and of banking in the strict and precise meaning of those terms, there is full, even ample provision for the needs of trade, then we should have been compelled to acknowledge the force of the statement and its perfect truth. But as trade, industrial enterprises and business undertakings of perfectly legitimate character and of general utility and advantage demand, in addition to such provision, further the co-operation and assistance of banking establishments not less in a coadjutant than in a financial sense help in money affairs, and whereas none of the many banks in existence here alone affords such facilities and that one only to a very small degree and none of the chartered banks even pretend to yield them at all, it is obvious that the mere numerical strength of our banks cannot be taken as any kind of proof that the calls of trade and commercial enterprise on them are amply provided for."
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