Excerpt from Abnormal Features of American Banking: Address by B. E. Walker, President of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, Given at the Meeting of the American Bankers' Association, Denver, Colorado, 30th September, 1908

I am a foreigner, but as five of the establishments included in the bank of which I am President are situated in cities of the United States, I hope you will not regard me as a foreigner for the moment. T here are very few banks in the whole country who have a larger interest in the soundness of your banking and in your freedom from panics than my own bank. Remembering my peculiar position, I am particularly desirous not to wound the susceptibilities of any of my hearers, but I hope it is safe to say that Alexander Hamilton was clearly the leading intellect in that wonderful group of men who framed the constitution. At a time when few men could withstand the onrush of new ideas, largely visionary and false, Which accompanied the French Revolution, Hamilton was unshaken in his clear vision as to the future of his country, and few will deny that where you followed his advice you did well, and where you opposed it you did not always act wisely. It may be argued that neither of the two Banks of the United States were so admirable in their careers that we need sigh over their removal, but we can only judge them by comparison with the smaller banks of the same period. In your colonial and revolutionary times you had a curiously full and varied experience in banking and currency. F iat money, depreciated coinage, currency based on land, clamour by debtors for cheaper money with which to pay debts, were all amply experienced. In the following period, contempor aneously with the first and second Banks of the United States, you passed through a time largely of mania in banking; a time when history was recording for this country such fundamental facts as that banks cannot establish a capital fund merely upon the promissory notes of shareholders; cannot put bank-notes into circulation even by the ex pedient of sending them far from home before issuing them, without considering how they are to be redeemed; can not lend money on land, or lock it up in other ways, and also have it again when the bank's debts, exigible on demand, fall to be paid. Indeed it was a time when every vagary in unsound banking was being tried. But Hamilton, from some of these experiences and from European history, planned for you a banking system which contained much of what is good in the successful systems of the world. You would not, however, have his system, but preferred to repeat in each new district, from east to south and west, wherever debt and ignorance combined to create banking and currency, the same errors which make such startling history in the early part of the nineteenth century. Is it not time for us to put aside that silly vanity to which democracies are inclined-that it is better to try our own experiments and to ignore history? Unfortunately the apparently brand-new experiments we are willing to try have usually occurred to others in the past, if we had but patience to discover the fact.

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