(2) Proudhon’s bank has also been confused with other banks of exchange which are really quite different. The ideas underlying such schemes had become prominent before Proudhon’s days, and numerous practical experiments had been attempted along the lines indicated. These banks aimed, not at the suppression of interest, but at a gradual _rapprochement_ between producer and consumer, the goods offered for sale being bought by the bank, and paid for in exchange notes upon an agreed basis of calculation. Buyers in their turn would come to the bank to obtain the necessaries of life, paying for them in exchange notes. An experiment of this kind was made by a certain Fulcrand Mazel in 1829.[681] In this case the bank was merely an _entrepôt_ which facilitated the marketing of the goods produced. Such a system is open to the objection that the value of the notes issued in payment for goods would necessarily vary with the fluctuations in the value of these goods during the interval which would elapse between the time they are taken in by the bank and their eventual purchase by consumers. Proudhon’s plan was to discount the goods already bought or actually delivered. The bank would only advance what was actually promised, but would make no charge for accommodation. Depreciation could only arise if the buyer were insolvent. It could never result from a fall in price as a result of a diminished demand for the product. Proudhon renounced all dealings with solidarity when he dismissed Mazel’s project.[682] (3) M. Solvay, a Belgian _entrepreneur_, has recently elaborated a scheme of “social accounting.” He also proposes the suppression of metallic money and the introduction of a perfect system of payment. Here, however, the analogy ends. What Solvay proposed was the replacement of metallic money, not by bank-notes, but by a system of cheques and clearing-houses. His plan owes its inspiration to the modern development of the clearing-house system. Solvay thought that the system might be so extended as to make the employment of money entirely unnecessary. To every such clearing-house the State would hand over a cheque-book, covering a sum varying with the amount of real or personal property which the house possessed. This cheque-book was to have two columns, one for receipts, the other for expenditure. Whenever any commodity was sold, the liquidation of debt would be effected by the buyer’s stamping the book on the receipt side and the seller’s stamping it on the expenditure side. As soon as the total value of these transactions equalled the initial sum which the cheque-book was supposed to represent the book would be returned to the State bureau, where each individual account would be made up. “In this way everybody’s receipts and expenditure will always be known with absolute clearness.”[683]