Abstract

The Turning Financial Worm

Among the distinctions possessed by Chicago is that of having been the center of opposition to branch banking in the United States. California formerly shared the burden and the honor, but California has since been lost to `the cause. She can do no more now than serve as a desolate object-lesson to the Cook County patriots who have long and steadily realized how wholly dependent the well-being of this country was upon the independent banker. To be sure, as was told recently in the journal some five thousand of `those independent bankers have disastrously failed to live up to their responsibilities. And to be sure, in California, where branch banking is practically universal, there have been only about ten failures in ten years, though the banks of that State were afflicted with the same depression that tried those in the Central West.