As a result of bad banking or mistaken banking, banks are very likely to get themselves loaded up with assets not easily realizable, and when the pinch comes they fail and go into the hands of a receiver. The liquidation of these assets is not an easy problem, especially as the law requires that the receiver shall recommend what shall be done with this or that asset, that the Comptroller shall approve, and that the district court shall enter a decree authorizing the sale.

While it is provided that the bank shall not loan upon real estate, a good many banks get such security by making a loan and then taking additional security in the form of a mortgage. I found in the failures of banks a good deal of such paper. There are many assets of a strange character. At one time I had a full equipment for an opera house. I had in a Dakota town a butcher shop. I had any amount of live stock; I had one trotting horse, which sold for $10,000. In Puget Sound a certain bank had as part of its assets enough cans to can a large portion of the salmon caught in Columbia river. And there is hardly a thing you could name, from an article of wearing apparel to a large manufactory, that at some time or other does not in this way get into the hands of the Comptroller.