If a 'branch,' such as the National Provincial Bank opens in an English country town, were opened in a corresponding French one, it would not pay its expenses.

You could not get any sufficient number of Frenchmen to agree to put their money there.

And so it is in all countries not of British descent, though in various degrees.

Deposit banking is a very difficult thing to begin, because people do not like to let their money out of their sight, especially do not like to let it out of sight without security--still more, cannot all at once agree on any single person to whom they are content to trust it unseen and unsecured.

Hypothetical history, which explains the past by what is simplest and commonest in the present, is in banking, as in most things, quite untrue.
The real history is very different.