It occurred in 1707, when I was but thirteen years old. It came in the form of a “run,” and certainly, but for timely help, I should have been torn to pieces.
The word run may be suggestive to you merely of a race between me and another bank; but in bank language it has a most terrifying and disagreeable meaning.
It is a sudden demand from everybody to whom you owe money to pay up on the spot, and without hesitation.
Your office is filled and refilled with people angrily and defiantly demanding their money. Such was the case with me, and in my one room in the Grocers’ Hall, at the date I mentioned.
I tried to console myself with the thought that if the people would but give me time I would pay everyone to the full, but, alas! I was old enough to know that this was not sufficient—my existence depended upon the whole world believing me to be safe and worthy of confidence, and their test of my trustworthiness was that I should pay everyone in full at a moment’s notice.
I was nearly wild, and, for the moment, utterly powerless. To me confidence was money, and by money I lived and breathed.
It was no use disguising the fact—I had not sufficient in my chests to pay the reckless demands.
Not that I had misused the money entrusted to me, but that I had lent it out again, that it might work and earn for me the means to pay interest to the depositors and afford me something for my trouble; all this was quite honourable and above board, and yet how frightened I was! Had I wished it I could not have run away, for you know I had but one room, without private doors and staircases; I was, therefore, compelled to stand and face the excited and unreasonable crowd.
In the case of a run, it is absolutely necessary to find the money somewhere, in order to meet the demand made by the public; for if once payment is suspended credit is gone, career blasted, and business at an end.
When a person asks me in confidence my definition of a run, I always answer, “A reckless, senseless attack on a bank—one in which self-interest is so overpowering as utterly to cover and blot out reason for the time being.”