People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 May 1896 — THE BANK SYSTEM. [ARTICLE]

THE BANK SYSTEM.

IT NEEDS A GREAT DEAL OF RECONSTRUCTION. Tbe "Integrity of the Banker" May Be Good Bnt When It Don’t Pay Debts Tbe Public Has No Use for It. The Sentinel: In the hurrah and excitement of properly making the “money question” an issue in the present campaign, “reformers” are apt to overlook some features of the question which are, to say the least, quite as important as the free coinage of silver. Our banking system, for instance, ie rotten to the core; is a series of privileges accorded banking corporations in return for which the great majority of the people derive not one whit of beneflt. Last Saturday the Supreme court of the State of Illinois handed down a decision in the celebrated Meadowcroft case, which, while dealing justly to a certain degree, makes admissions ana acknowledgments relative to the banking system showing its entire lack of safeguards and protection to creditors afforded by law in other lines of bust? ness, and fully justifying all the hard things this and a few other reform papers have said against the banking business in general as at present conducted. It will be remembered that the Meadowcroft brothers ran a bank in Chicago two years ago and received deposits up to the hour of failure, knowing their business to be insolvent. For this they were prosecuted and got off with a light sentence—one year in the penitentiary. Being ex-bankers they had funds and friends enough to keep the matter in the courts for nearly two years, and will probably now appeal their case to the Supreme Court of the United States with a chance of getting clear altogether, as the banker combine that runs the government will hardly permit so dangerous a precedent to be established as that a banker must not take all the money offered him, no matter what the circumstances. The Illinois Supreme court In rendering this decision, declare that: “The banking business is of a semipublic nature; that the banker occupies the position of trustee for the people; the depositing of money possesses no element of a trade; the transaction is made purely on the integrity of the banker.” Reader, do you know of any other business in which a man planks over money by the hundred thousand dollars, sometimes, with no security except that which rests “purely on the integrity of the banker?” If anybody else but a banker receives tht money of the public he is made to give bonds in three times the amount he is likely to receive. Who would consent to putting a county treasurer into office without requiring him to give bonds? Or what banker would take his own medicine and make loans without so much as taking the borrower’s note, depending solely “on the integrity of the individual?” If you want to “unite all the reform forces on the money question” chuck in a plank requiring the bankers to give bonds sufficient to cover all deposits they are likely to receive. The party that does that can “sweep the country” sure enough. The decision of the court in the Meadowcroft case further states: “When Receiver Crandall investigated the books of the firm he found less than 1 per cent of the $420,000 liabilities. “Nothing remains for a defrauded depositor after a bank fails save th,e honesty of the banker.” Bankers have never shown themselves to be any more honest than other people, statistics show that about one-fifth of the banks chartered in the United States, including national banks, sooner or later go to the wall; statistics also prove that banks that fail seldom pay to exceed 10 per cent, on their liabilities. « If a poor man receives money on trust and fails to account for It at proper time, the law calls Its embezzlement. and railroads him to the penitentiary forthwith. If a banker receives money .on trust and fails to account for it, it is called “bank suspension,” and this is the first instance on record where it has been regarded as a criminal offense, and then only because the bank received a fair-sized deposit just before closing its doors. Of what use is it to coin all the gold and silver in the world if it is to be turned over to bankers without an equivalent? That government which fails to provide a safe place of deposit for the people’s money other than those dependent “purely on the integrity of the banker” is in itself a failure. The monetary “reformers may howl all they please about all other phases of the money question, but their howling will amount to little until they pull off their kid gloves' and go to work in earnest to take the kinks out of the banking business. Make the bankers give bonds to cover deposits or shut up shop. The people running their own banking business, through country and township treasurers, would be a good way, too, to afford the relief demanded. By all means, gentlemen reformers, if you don’t do another thing toward settling the money question, revise the banking business, and at least make it as honest and as fair dealing with its creditors as other kinds of business.