By F. E. Steele.

There is only one school in which the practice of banking can be properly learned, and that school is - a bank. In that school, however, as in others, text-books are required, since in banking, as in most businesses requiring few heads but many hands, the principle of the Division of Labour is very fully exemplified. In a large banking office, a man may spend years of his life doing the same thing over and over again in one department, remaining to a great extent in ignorance, so far as regards actual experience - the best of teachers - of the working of the machine as a whole, and its manifold relationship to the complex mechanism of commerce. For even a bowing acquaintance with these, he must, for a time, look mainly to books, the second best teachers, and these, if of the right kind, will assist in filling the inevitable gaps.

Whilst the art of banking is best learned by dint of practical experience, - "a force de forger on dement forgeron" - the science of banking, and the laws which govern currency, can, for sheer lack of opportunity, be so learned by only a few, and text-books, desirable as adjuncts in banking practice, become a prime necessity in studying that groundwork of theory on which all sound practice is reared. For instance, thanks to its discoverer and his followers, Gresham's Law, to which Mr. Sykes devotes some of his best pages, is to-day a currency commonplace, but centuries of bungling and of loss on the part of nations elapsed before the knowledge that a debtor will always pay his creditor in the least valuable medium which will be accepted, was carried to its logical issue, made a principle of currency, and recognised in national and international finance. To-day, thanks to earlier thinkers and writers, the novice may learn from a currency text-book what the best heads in Europe failed for centuries to gather from experiment.

Suitable text-books, therefore, must be found, and such a book is this of Mr. Sykes. In the theory of Currency and of Banking he is well versed, whilst in practical banking he has had the best of all forms of banking education; a varied banking experience. Prima facie, we expect him to be instructive, and in this respect the present work fulfils our expectation. But this is not enough. To introduce a book as "instructive" is, in these days, to pronounce its doom. It must do more than instruct; it must interest, if it is to survive; and this book, though necessarily much condensed, will be found to fulfil this further condition. That this should be so is probably due to the fact that the substance of much of it was first delivered in the form of lectures to City men; and to hold the attention of a hundred or more City men after they (and the lecturer) have; gone through a full day of banking, stock-broking, bill-discounting, or what not, is no easy task; it is an impossible one unless, in addition to knowing your subject, you can contrive to make it fairly attractive. Speaking broadly and candidly, only two kinds of purely financial writing can be classed as interesting. The first belongs to a generation now almost past; the generation of Bagehot and of Giffen ; the second consists of those parts of the City articles of the daily papers which deal with the stocks and shares we hold, or hope to hold.

Though he would probably not lay claim to the main characteristics of either school, Mr. Sykes contrives to put his points in a manner which invites attention. In dealing with elementary matters of currency, for example, he refers to the shilling as the "degenerate descendant" of the twentieth part of a pound weight of silver, and in discussing financial crises he compares the raising of the rate of interest to the application of the brake to a bicycle descending a steep hill. "A rash use of the brake at the worst part of the hill will probably only precipitate the calamity which it is desired to avoid" - a simile, homely but apt, which carries the writer's shaft home.

The outstanding feature of the book, however, is not this. It is the fact that it brings together, within two covers, information some of which is not to be found in books at all, but of which the greater part would have to be sought in many other books. If we want information on currency problems, we turn to the works of Jevons, Walker or Nicholson; for the Foreign Exchanges we go to Goschen and Clare; for Banking Law to Paget, Grant, or Hart; for Banking History to Gilbart, Andreades, and MacLeod; for Banking Practice to Hutchison if we have leisure and means; to Moxon if there is pressure on our time and pocket; and to George Rae if the combination of a colloquial style and a ripe experience appeals to us. In this book of Mr. Sykes's all these subjects are handled; none of them so voluminously, of course, as in the works of some of the writers referred to, but all in a manner which fully suffices to give the reader a clear working idea of their nature and scope. This is the characteristic which will commend the book both to the practical banker and to the student of banking and currency problems.

F. E. Steele.