Now Mr. J. Theodore Harris--having, I suspect, a warmer feeling for the incident than he has allowed to appear in these scientific pages--has done what perhaps I or some other economic student of the eighties or nineties ought to have done, namely, gone to Guernsey to dig up, out of the official records, the incident as it actually occurred. What is interesting is that he has found that the myth of the veteran Owenite or Chartist is, in all essentials, confirmed by the documents. The story is true. The Guernsey Market House was built without a loan and without the payment of interest. It does not follow, however, that it was any more built without the aid of capital, than was St. Paul's Cathedral or the Manchester Ship Canal. Mr. Harris, contenting himself with the austerely exact record drawn from the documents, does not indulge in any speculative hypothesis as to who provided the capital, or who bore the burden that would otherwise have been interest. Let me use the fuller privilege of the preface-writer, and supply some hypothetical elucidations. What the Guernsey community did was that which nearly every community has done at one time or another, namely, issue paper money. The part of the story that we do not know is (_a_) what thereupon happened to the aggregate amount of "currency" of all kinds then in circulation within the island, in relation to the work which that currency had to do; (_b_) what happened to the prices of commodities. It may well have been that the issue of paper money was promptly followed by some shipments of metallic money to England or France--perhaps even in payment for imported materials for the market house--so that the aggregate amount of "currency" in the island was not in fact increased. Accordingly, no change of prices may have taken place. In such a case, Guernsey would merely have substituted paper for gold in its currency. The gold-capital heretofore in use as currency, and there, of course, yielding no capitalist any toll of interest, would, in effect, have been borrowed to expend upon the building of the Market House. And, as paper money probably served the purposes of the island every bit as well as gold, nobody was any the worse. By giving up the needless extravagance of using gold coins as counters, and by taking to paper counters instead, Guernsey really got its Market House without cost. The same resource is open to any community already possessing a gold currency, and becoming civilised and self-restrained and sensible enough to arrange to do without gold counters in its internal trade. But Guernsey could not have gone on equipping itself with endless municipal buildings as out of a bottomless purse. The resource is a limited one. This is a trick which can only be played once. When the gold has once been withdrawn from the currency, and diverted to another use, there is no more left with which to repeat the apparent miracle.