Bagehot's Lombard Street was begun, as he tells us in his Advertisement, in the autumn of 1870. It is.a wonderful achievement, that a book dealing with the shifting quicksands of the money market should still, after more than forty years, be a classic of which no one who wishes to understand the subject can afford to be ignorant. Since it is so, it is evidently desir able to give, for those of its readers who are not acquainted with the money market of today, a brief account Of the chief movements and tendencies which have altered the conditions since Bagehot wrote.