Meantime, however, progress toward a condition which may render unnecessary further intervention on the part of the government is rapid. The best bankers are more and more recognizing that in addition to their duty to stockholders and to depositors they also owe a general duty to the community, since the maintenance of solvency and convertibility has been intrusted to them, and since they therefore are in charge in a peculiar sense of the regulating economic mechanism of society. Gradually the tendency among the ablest and best men in banking is toward the granting of credit as a matter of routine upon the presentation of specific kinds of security or the establishment of a certain level of operations, as shown by a suitable statement, and the abandonment of the type of operation in which credit was granted merely because of personal considerations. It still remains true that a certain class of bankers are in the habit of talking vaguely about the importance of "character" as a basis for borrowing and its superiority to collateral as a protection for loans. In this, as in all such expressions, there is a substratum of truth. No banker wants to make loans to a borrower who he knows is dishonest, no matter how valuable the collateral offered.

On the other hand, no banker has the right to lend funds intrusted to his charge to a customer of "character" but who has no definite protection for the funds or wishes to apply them in speculation. Banking is essentially a fiduciary occupation, and as this is more and more recognized the basis of credit comes to be better and better established and the extension of credit less and less a matter of favor or "character," and more and more a matter of routine. This is as it should be, and eventually it may be expected that credit will be a purely scientific study, and its extension - the "lending of money" - will be a routine process dependent entirely upon submission of proper evidence of ownership or value or of a definite volume of business, by the applicant for credit. The cliques and groups which in isolated cases now "manage" banks in their own interest and divert the funds hither and thither for the promotion of their own enterprises will gradually be discredited or driven from business through the tightening of legislative requirements, and perhaps through the direct intervention of the government.

Probably governmental supervision and control of transportation would never have gone so fast or so far as it has gone had transportation managers been ready to undertake their responsibility as public servants. Much the same may be said of banking. In the case of banking, however, there is a much broader possibility of competition and self-protection than could ever be true in transportation, especially in those countries where free banking has taken definite root. Nevertheless, the struggle of the future in connection with banking will aim to secure gradual enforcement of the idea of the public quality of the profession and the elimination of those transactions and dealings which have heretofore been possible by reason of the low conception of banking and the improper use of funds of the public placed in the hands of boards of directors. Banking, in short, during the next quarter century will pass through a period of discussion and controversy designed to determine how far public intervention shall go in the management of the business, and the progress of such public intervention will depend entirely upon the progressive capacity of bankers themselves. As already stated, a hopeful sign of the times is that so widespread and general a perception of this situation exists among financiers and that there is so large a percentage of them who stand ready to accept their full duty to the community.