A Rotten “Bank.”

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Aug 3, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 31.

A Rotten “Bank.”

Mr. High, the bank commissioner of California, a news item informs us, has compelled a saloon in Santa Cruz to relinquish the name of “The Bank.” He decided that no saloon could masquerade under that name. Yet the saloon is a place of deposit, where money and houses and lands and ruined hopes and reputation and character are passed over the counter into its bottomless till. Mr. High may have recognized this, but it is his business to see that banks are solvent, able to pay depositors, and he knew, of course, that not one stiver of all that any depositor placed therein came back save in accursed negatives of all actual worth. He could not suppress the place of deposit, but he could demand that it should relinquish the name of a legal institution supposed to stand for honorable dealing. The news item further tells us that the saloon owners are wavering between two names, “The Banc” or “The Ban,” similar in sound to “The Bank.” The former would be appropriate in one of the applications the French give it, namely, a “reef,” on which ships go to wreck and everlasting ruin. The latter name would be the more appropriate, in its common meaning of “curse.” “The Ban” would also have a generic meaning as applying to all saloons; for they are always and everywhere an unmitigated curse, apart from all who may own them and run them, and who may be no better or worse than other men. By all means let the saloon be named “The Ban.” Such it is.