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and industrial progress of the Hawaiian Islands. Its operations began with the encouragement of the whaling business, the leading industry of the Islands in those early years of its civilization. When the sugar industry was in its inception, as well as when largely developed, Messrs. Bishop & Co. again and again proved its strong right arm. Once the firm borrowed $500,000 at the abnormally high rate of interest of 1 per cent per month from a San Francisco syndicate, which amount was devoted to tiding the planting interests over a perilous crisis. The bank made absolutely nothing out of this transaction, but had the satisfaction of saving the country by preserving, at a perilous financial crisis, its mainstay from falling. The able management of Charles R. Bishop created general confidence in the bank from its earliest period, a confidence that the public has never had cause to regret and which soon placed the bank on the high road to prosperity. Since Mr. Bishop retired from active participation in the management, some six years since, Hon. Samuel M. Damon, the present Minister of Finance of the Hawaiian Republic, assumed that responsibility, and under his conservative and wise direction the bank has become more prosperous than ever. Once and once only has the bank been threatened with even a partial withdrawal of public confidence on the part of its depositors and a run on its financial resources threatened. One Sunday morning about thirty years ago news reached Honolulu that the Bank of California had failed. The re-