a board of directors chosen too young for it to be known whether they are able; a committee of management in which seniority is the necessary qualification, and old age the common result.” It was a strange, even eccentric way of doing things—for the most important financial institution in Britain, in fact in the world, to be in the hands of a group of amateurs, men who generally would have preferred to be doing something else but who viewed the years they devoted to steering the Bank as a form of civic duty.
