Many things which seem simple and which work well when firmly established, are very hard to establish among new people, and not very easy to explain to them. It assumes that what works most easily when established is that which it would be the most easy to establish, and that what seems simplest when familiar would be most easily appreciated by the mind though unfamiliar. Conjectural history would be inclined to say that all banking began thus: but such history is rarely of any value.
They carry from home the idea and the habit of banking, and they take to it as soon as they can in their new world. English colonists do not like the risk of keeping their money, and they wish to make an interest on it. 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.
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. Upon grounds of probability a fictitious sketch was made of the possible origin of things existing. In the last century, a favourite subject of literary ingenuity was "conjectural history," as it was then called.
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