What is Dickens suggesting with the following description?"In this respect the House was much on a par with the Country; which did very often...

This passage from Book the Second, Chapter 1, entitled
"Five Years Later," is part of a description of Tellson's Bank.  In the first paragraph,
Dickens likens Tellson's to a prison:  "It is very small, very dark, very
incommodious."  A very old-fashioned place, but the partners in the House are proud of
its smallness and antiquity.  Comparing the bank to the country, Dickens draws a
familiar parallel for him:  Society is also like a prison.  Despite laws being
objectionable, there are no improvements made by the "old guard" who wishes to maintain
traditional methods of punishment.  For instance, the death penalty is dealt to those
convicted of such minor crimes as forgery and petty thief:  "Death was very much in
vogue."

With wry humor, Dickens writes that Tellson's has
become the triumphant perfection of inconvenience (like the country).  And, continuing
the metaphor of the "old guard" for the partners of the bank and the interior as a
prison for this bank, he writes that customers must burst through a door of "idiotic
obstinancy" and fall into Tellson's and come to one's senses before the "oldest of men"
who make the currency "shake as if the wind rustled it."  Like a prisoner, the customer
is conducted to a

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species of Condemned Hold at the back where you
meditated on a misspent life, until the House came with its hands in its pockets, and
you could hardly blink at it in the dismal twilight. 

 Your
money came out of, or went into, wormy old wooden drawers, particles of which flew up
your nose and down your throat when they were opened and shut. Your bank notes had a
musty odour, as if they were fast decomposing into rags again. Your plate was stowed
away among the neighbouring cesspools, and evil communications corrupted its good polish
in a day or two....Your lighter boxes of family papers went up-stairs into a Barmecide
room, that always had a great dining-table in it‚ and never had a dinner, and where,
even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty, the first letters written to you
by your old love, or by your little children, were but newly released from the horror of
being ogled‚ through the windows, by the heads exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate
brutality and ferocity worthy of Abyssinia or
Ashantee.

Clearly, Tellson's
Bank has control over its customers.  Dickens, who had read Thomas Carlysle's history of
the French Revolution, was concerned at the many restrictions placed upon the English
during the Victorian period.  He felt that people were so restricted that society has
become as he describes Tellson's Bank.  With such controls, Dickens worried that
rebellion might occur in England, as well.