On the other hand, there may easily have been no special shipments of metallic money from the island, and the aggregate "currency" may have been increased, in relation to the work that it had to do, by the amount of the note issue. In that case, the economist would, for reasons into which I have no space to go on the present occasion, expect to see a gradual and silent rise of prices. Such a rise would seem, to the ordinary Guernsey housekeeper and shopkeeper, as inevitable, and at the same time as annoying as any other of those mysterious increases in the cost of eggs and meat that Anthony Trollope described with such uneconomic charm in _Why Frau Frohmann raised her prices_--a work which I do not find prescribed, as it might well be, for undergraduate reading. There is even a third hypothesis, to which Mr. Harris has directed my attention. There may have been, before the note issue, an actual dearth of currency, or a growing disproportion between the amount of the currency and the work that it had to do. Mr. Harris infers from his reading that such a stringency had been actually experienced in Guernsey, and that it was for this reason that successive attempts were made to prevent foreign coins from being gradually withdrawn from the island. Such a stringency, the economist would infer, would produce a progressive fall of prices, leading, by the silent operations of external trade, to a gradual readjustment of the amount of currency in circulation, by influx of gold from outside, until a new equilibrium had been reached. If the Guernsey Government's note issue happened to be made at such a moment, it may well have taken the place of the hypothetical inflow of gold, so far as the island currency was concerned. It may even have averted a fall in prices that would otherwise have taken place, the economic effect on the consumer's pockets being in that case much the same as if an actual rise had occurred. But the Guernsey Government, on this hypothesis, would, by substituting paper for gold, have gained for the community the equivalent of the cost of the addition to the gold currency which expanding population and trade were making necessary; and this gain was expended in building the Market House.