Volume 2 - ElectricCanadian.com

454 HISTORY OF THE BANKreserve fund and the rate per cent, of the last dividend declaredby them. In 1888 the list of persons authorized to issue awarehouse receipt for their own goods, and pledge it to a bankas security for advances, was again enlarged to include adistiller. 1The firstimportant revision of the general Bank Act of1871 was undertaken in 1890, after twenty years of experiencehad demonstrated its general capacity to meet the expandingrequirements of the country, as well as its more serious defects.Many of the sections were rearranged, and a large number ofminor amendments were made, giving satisfaction to boththe banks and the business community, and rendering theAct at once more efficient and more intelligible. In most ofthese details the public manifested little or no interest. Otherand more radical proposals, however, had been the subject ofconsiderable popular agitation and discussion, which werereflected in the press and in Parliament; but public opinionisnot the safest of guides in matters of a technical or professionalnature, and even in the case of acknowledged evils,popular remedies are apt not only to be ineffective but also todivert attention from the real remedy.Among the defects of the banking system which had beenrevealed were the following: First, the imperfect currency ofthe bank-note issues, which constituted, apart from smallDominion notes and coin for change-making purposes, almostthe whole of the circulating medium of the country. Whilethe notes were by law receivable at par by all branches of theissuing bank, they were not necessarily accepted at par byother banks, especially in the case of the notes of the smallerbanks when presented at a considerable distance from thehead office.This was an increasing inconvenience owing tothe expanding inter-provincial trade of the country. Someof the larger banks had already arranged for the acceptance ofin all thetheir notes at parothers had not. Secondly,By 51 Viet., 1888, c. xxvii.provinces of Canada, but manydifficulties had resulted from the