19
THE CHICAGO BANKER
October j, 1p08]
The Banker and
the Nation
CENTRAL
AND
SOUTHWESTERN
BANKERS
located in territory tributary to St. Louis, and in any way concerned in the movement of live stock to or from the St. Louis National Stock Yards
ARE
INTERESTED
IN
securing prompt, safe and profit-able handling of their
LIVE
STOCK
BUSINESS.
An unusually fortunate combina-tion of factors allows us to give on this class of business
PERFECT SERVICE
לללל
CORRESPONDENCE DESIRED
לליל
THE
NATIONAL STOCK YARDS NATIONAL BANK
NATIONAL STOCK YARDS ILLINOIS
(At the St. Louis Stock Yards)
Capital	-	-	$ 350,000
Surplus and Profits -	-	100,000
Deposits -	-	-	2,750,000
serve the general interest; to be public men serving the country as well as private men serving their depositors and the enterprises whose securities and notes they hold. How capital is to draw near to the people and serve them at once obviously and safely, is the question, the great and now pressing question, which it is the particular duty of the banker to answer. No one else can answer it so intelligently; and if he does not answer it, others will, it may be to his detriment and to the general embarrassment of the country. The occasion and the responsibility are yours.
We live in a very interesting time of awakening. in a period of reconstruction and readjust
WOODROW WILSON Princeton, N. J.
ment, when everything is being questioned, and even old foundations are threatened with change. But it is not a time of danger if we do not lose our heads and ignore our consciences. It is, on the contrary, a time of extraordinary privilege and opportunity when men of every class have begun to think upon the themes of the public welfare as they never thought before.
V*
Chicago Chapter Notes
The entertainment committee reports that Mr. Kiser has completed three acts of the burlesque < n the “Man from Home,” and that in another week he will have selected the cast. As soon as the above are complete work will begin in earnest. A prize will be awarded the bank man submitting the most original design in the shape of a poster which will be used to advertise the show. Something unique and novel in the way of a souvenir book is promised to all who attend the burlesque.
The chairman of the debate society announces that a meeting of the society will be held at chapter headquarters Tuesday evening, October 6th, for the purpose of holding a preliminary contest to determine the team that will represent Chicago chapter in the forthcoming inter-city debate with Indianapolis, which is to be held November 4th, at Indianapolis, before the Indiana Bankers Association. The question to be debated, “Resolved, Shall the United States Guaranty the Deposits of National Banks,” is a momentous one and of universal importance especially to bankers and should draw out some tip-top arguments. Chicago will defend the negative side of the question.
Dr. Woodrow Wilson, president of the Princeton University, at the American Bankers Association convention, on Wednesday afternoon, spoke on “The Banker and the Nation.” He said in part:
We have witnessed in recent years an extraordinary a־wakening of the public conscience with regard to the methods of modern business—and of the private conscience also, for scores of business men have become conscious, as they never were before, that the eager push, and ambition, and competition of modern business had hurried them, oftentimes unconsciously, into practices which they had not stopped, in the heat of the struggle, to question, but which they now see to have been immoral and against the public interest. Sometimes the process of their demoralization was very subtle, very gradual, very obscure, and therefore hidden from their consciences. Sometimes it was crude and obvious enough, but they did not stop to be careful, thinking of their rivals and not of their morals. But now the moral and political aspects of the whole matter are laid bare to their own view, as well as to the view of the world, and we have run out of quiet waters into a very cyclone of reform. No man is so poor as not to have his policies for everything. The whole structure of society is being critically looked over, and changes of the most radical character are being soberly discussed, which it would take generations to perfect, but which we are hopefully thinking of putting out to contract to be finished by a specified date well within the limits of our own time.
I am sure that many bankers must have become acutely and sensitively aware of the fact that the most isolated, and the most criticised interest of all is banking. The banks are, in the general view and estimation, the special and exclusive instrumentalities of capital used on a large scale. They stand remote from the laborer and the body of the people and put whatever comes into their coffers at the disposal of the big captains of industry, the great masters of finance, the corporations which are in the way to crush all competitors.
I shall not now stop to ask how far this view of the banks is true. I need not tell you that in large part it is false. I know that the close connection of the banks with the larger operations of commerce and finance is natural and not illicit, and that the banks turn very cheerfully and very cordially to the smaller pieces of business. Time was when the banks never advertised, never condescended to solicit business; now thev eagerly seek it in small pieces as well as big. The banks are in fact, and in spirit, at the service of every man to the limit of his known trustworthiness and credit, and they know very well that there is nrofit in multiplying small accounts and small loans. But, on the other hand, they are in fact singularly remote from the laborer and the body of the people.
********
Bankers, like men of every other interest, have their lot and part in the nation, their social function and their political duty. We have come upon a time of crisis when it is made to appear, and is in part true, that interest is arrayed against interest; and it is our duty to turn the war into peace. It is the duty of the banker, as it is the duty of men of every other class, to see to it that there be in his calling no class spirit, no feeling of antagonism to the people, to plain men whom the bankers to their great loss and detriment do not know. It is their duty to be intelligent, thoughtful, patriotic intermediaries between capital and the people at large; to understand apd