INTRODUCTION 1 CHAP. I. CONSTITUTION OF GUERNSEY 4 II. THE SECURITY OF THE NOTES 6 III. MUNICIPAL ENTERPRISE--THE ISSUE OF THE NOTES 9 IV. THE UTILITY OF THE NOTES 20 V. FIRST RUMBLINGS OF OPPOSITION 25 VI. THE REPLY OF THE STATES 30 VII. THE CRISIS 45 VIII. THE END 55 CONCLUSION 59 APPENDIX 61 PREFACE Those who during the past thirty or forty years have frequented working men's clubs or other centres of discussion in which, here and there, an Owenite survivor or a Chartist veteran was to be found, will often have heard of the Guernsey Market House. Here, it would be explained, was a building provided by the Guernsey community for its own uses, without borrowing, without any toll of interest, and, indeed, without cost. To many a humble disputant the Guernsey Market House seemed, in some mysterious way, to have been exempt from that servitude to previously accumulated capital in which the whole creation groaneth and travaileth. By the simple expedient of paying for the work in Government notes--issued to the purveyors of material, the master-workmen and the operatives, accepted as currency throughout the island, and eventually redeemed out of the annual market revenues--all tribute to the capitalist was avoided. In face of this successful experiment, the fact that we, in England, continued to raise loans and subject ourselves to "drag at each remove a lengthening chain" of interest on public debt, often seemed so perplexingly foolish as to be inexplicable, except as the outcome of some deep-laid plot of "the money power." When first I heard of this Guernsey Market House, as in some mysterious way exempted from the common lot, I was curious to enquire what transaction had, in fact, taken place in an island which was, after all, not so far removed in space or time from the Lombard Street that I knew. In all the writings of the economists (for which my estimate was at that time, as indeed it is now, such as I could not easily put into appropriate words), I found no mention of this Phoenix among market-houses. I fear that, too hastily, I dismissed the story as mythical.