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THE BANK. CA~IT ALISM OF YOUNG BENGAL 129
pursue their ClUeer as chiefly "commercial" institutions.
Very few, if any, "specialise in the financing of buying
and selling in Calcutta as well as between Calcutta and
the mofussil. The existing 800 banks of Bengal generally
call themselves Loan Offices, as we are all aware. To
a certain extent they serve the function of pawnshops,
but their main business consists in the advance of money
against lands and house properties. They belong indeed to
'the general type of land-mortgage banks. Some of them
have taken to"-the financing of trade in . a subsidiary
. capacity . But it is this financing of trade that ought to be
the primary function of several new banks or old banks
reconstituted.
What we need from the banks is a new type of service
for their field of operations. By the world standard,
again, it may be pointed out that, functionally speaking •.
this would be really but the kindergarten stage of commercial
banking. The functions of commercial banks
in Eur-America and Japan, as well as the foreign "exchange
banks" in this country, exhibit a much higher
and more complicated range. The buying and selling
·of bills of all sorts, "acceptances J" .. re-discounts" and
so forth, belong to a bank language, the very alphabet
of which we Bengalis have hardly commenced mastermg.
Then there are the more ambitious functions
of industry-underwriting, speculation in the stock ex­
.change shares, etc., in which modem banks and very
often new types of banks are specialising. But infants as
we . are and incapable as wee generally are at. the present
moment of venturing on these novel services, the establishment
of several commercial. banks is to be eV¥lluated
as an important landmark in the banking evolution of