CHAPTER III.
How Lombard Street Came to Exist, and Why It Assumed Its Present Form.
In the last century, a favourite subject of literary ingenuity was 'conjectural history,' as it was then called.

Upon grounds of probability a fictitious sketch was made of the possible origin of things existing.

If this kind of speculation were now applied to banking, the natural and first idea would be that large systems of deposit banking grew up in the early world, just as they grow up now in any large English colony.

As soon as any such community becomes rich enough to have much money, and compact enough to be able to lodge its money in single banks, it at once begins so to do.

English colonists do not like the risk of keeping their money, and they wish to make an interest on it.