There is a settlement in the Union Bank building, Chancery Lane, which
has made three large cracks in the main door steps. I remember these
cracks more than twenty years ago, just after the bank was built, as mere
thin lines and now they must be some half an inch wide and are still
slowly widening. They have altered very gradually, but not an hour or a
minute has passed without a groaning and travailing together on the part
of every stone and piece of timber in the building to settle how a _modus
vivendi_ should be arrived at. This is why the crack is said to be
caused by a settlement—some parts of the building willing this and some
that, and the battle going on, as even the steadiest and most unbroken
battles must go, by fits and starts which, though to us appearing as an
even tenor, would, if we could see them under a microscope, prove to be a
succession of bloody engagements between regiments that sometimes lost
and sometimes won. Sometimes, doubtless, strained relations have got
settled by peaceful arbitration and reference to the solicitors of the
contending parts without open visible rupture; at other times, again,
discontent has gathered on discontent as the snow upon a sub-alpine
slope, flake by flake, till the last is one too many and the whole comes
crashing down—whereon the cracks have opened some minute fraction of an
inch wider.
Of this we see nothing. All we note is that a score of years have gone
by and that the cracks are rather wider. So, doubtless, if the materials
of which the bank is built could speak, they would say they knew nothing
of the varied interests that sometimes coalesce and sometimes conflict
within the building. The joys of the rich depositor, the anguish of the
bankrupt are nothing to them; the stream of people coming in and going
out is as steady, continuous a thing to them as a blowing wind or a
running river to ourselves; all they know or care about is that they have
a trifle more weight of books and clerks and bullion than they once had,
and that this hinders them somewhat in their effort after a permanent
settlement.