VIEWS ON BANKING. 125 



part of Sir Robert Peel that the Scotch might put too 

 great confidence in their one pound notes ; and the 

 opinion of eminent Scottish bankers, that if they were 

 deprived of their note circulation, they would be com- 

 pelled to close their branch banks, and thus curtail the 

 accommodation they had afforded to industry in the 

 provinces, was conclusive against tampering with a 

 system which might be injured but could hardly be im- 

 proved. ' We have the authority/ wrote Miller, ' of the 

 first men of the country for holding that our cash credits 

 could not outlive the projected change of Sir Robert for 

 a twelvemonth/ In a provincial bank he had ample op- 

 portunities of observing the operation of the Cash Credit 

 system of Scottish banking ; and as it would be difficult 

 to find a more lucid and appreciative account of that 

 far-famed system than Miller's, and the passage, apart 

 from biographical considerations, is interesting, I shall 

 here insert it. 



SCOTCH CASH ACCOUNTS. 



' In at least one department of banking the Scotch 

 have not yet been imitated in any other country. Hume 

 published the second part of his Essays, Moral, Political, 

 and Literary ', in 1752, just ninety -two years ago; and 

 in this work, in his essay on the balance of trade, we 

 find the first notice of a Cash Credit Account. He de- 

 scribes it as " one of the most ingenious ideas that has 

 been executed in commerce," and as first devised in 

 Edinburgh only a few years previous. And we see that 

 Sir Walter, in describing it a second time, seventy-four 

 years after, had still to characterize it as " peculiar to 

 Scotland." The description of Hume is singularly happy 

 and philosophic. " A man goes to the bank," he says, 

 " and finds surety to the amount, we shall suppose, of a 

 thousand pounds. This money, or any part of it, he 



