May 5.
Ar midday to-day Sir Beilby Alston, His Majesty's Minister in Peking, is to lay the foundation of the new building of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank and we take the opportunity to offer Wayfoong our warm congratulations on its past, our best wishes for its future, prosperity. Elsewhere in this issue, a copy of which is to be sealed up in the foundations of the bank, we publish an account of the old building and of the cne that is to be. That old building seemed when it was first erected, and for many subsequent Years, very large indeed. That it eventually became utterly too small for the requirements of the undertaking is common knowledge. It may even be one day, that the new building may have to be enlarged, if the progressive increase of the past fifty years is maintained. Sir Thomas Jackson was scoffed at by many people in Hongkong when he insisted on rebuilding the bank's premises on their present lines. But he was right and the scoffers wrong, and some of them have since had to pay in their own businesses for their scepticism, and we believe that if '''P. J." had planned far more extensively than he did in Hongkong, his successors to-day would not have been sorry. The story of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank is witness to the advantages of the large view in all things and we may hope and believe that the confidence which has led to the same policy being adopted in this new home in Shanghai will not be misplaced.
The influence"of majestic buildings on the energies and imagination of those who use them cannot be exaggerated. The great merchant princes of the past knew it well and have left us the evidence of their belief in man~ lovely edifices, notably the wonderful Cloth Hall at Ypres, now alas, in ruins. In thus rearing stately halls for the transaction of their business, they proclaimed their implicit. conviction that commerce. and finance are not the mere huckstering that some try to pretend, but have a noble part to play in the destinies of nations. A business institution is necessarily a business institution in every day affairs. It must see that others fulfil their obligations to it, as punctually as it does itself. But there is no lack of instances in the history of the Hongkong Shanghai Bank when it has upheld public and individual credit in crises that might otherwise have brought- almost universal ruin; and if it be objected that the bank itself, in acting otherwise, would have been the worst sufferer, it is possible to argue than even patriotism is a refined form of selfishness. Ancestry does tell, even in these socialistic days, and the ancestry of Wayfoong, without exaggeration, reads well. It tells us that no man of business, banker, merchant or manufacturer will have any lasting success unless he studies his clients' interests as well as his own. It is in that sense that business becomes dignified, and this dignity will be embodied in the grand design of the new bank building for the daily inspiration of its servants.
But the new building is a thing of interest and pride to others besides the shareholders and officers of the bank itself. That is_ evidenced in the fact that Sir Beilby Alston has come from Peking to lay the foundation stone and that Vice-Admiral Duff
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.