Besides, when banks do not lay down a well digested plan for paying regularly, and without complaining, this _grand balance_ due to strangers, they are forced to have recourse to expedients for preserving their credit, more burdensome, perhaps, than what is required of them; and not near so effectual for removing the inconveniences complained of. The expedients they fall upon to obtain credit, coin, and bills, are so various, and so complicated, that they alone are able to explain them. Sometimes we see them entring into contracts with private merchants and exchangers, (_living among themselves!_) who engage for a certain premium to furnish coin as it is demanded. The consequence of this, is, to expose the bank to a new demand for coin, from the very contractors, in order to fulfil their engagements; an abuse we have taken notice of above in speaking of the _bank circulation_ of England. Let us suppose that these undertakers for coin do really set out by doing _in part_ what banks should _effectually_ do themselves, that is, by bringing from another nation, the coin which they are to supply. What is the consequence? The banks pay the undertaker for this coin in their own notes. Did they only engage to pay a certain interest for the coin so provided, then the end would be accomplished, with the additional expence to them of paying the undertaker for his expence, trouble, and profit. But if they, instead of paying interest for the coin so furnished, shall issue their notes for the full value of it, such notes can never enter into domestic circulation, so as to be suspended in it as it were; because it is not domestic circulation which has demanded them: they must then return upon the bank, either from the very hand who received them, or at least, after a short circulation; and thus draw out again the whole coin furnished by the undertaker. This produces a prodigious circulation of coin, and induces people to imagine that either the _grand balance_ is inexhaustible, or that the premium upon money at London is very high, or that people can contrive a fictitious balance, as a means of profiting upon coin, after the balance has been actually paid[11]. Footnote 11: The directors of the bank of England have had recourse to a like expedient with as little success. They used, during the war, to buy up, with their paper, the coin brought in by privateers; and after they had been at this trouble, the notes they had given for it returned upon them, and drew it out again. This method of providing coin is absolutely delusive, and opens a door to infinite abuse. Those who furnish the coin to the bank, are either in the combination against the bank, and draw it out as fast as they throw it in; or they are not in the combination: if they are in the combination, they profit by it; if they are not, they are hurt by their contract, and other exchangers draw the advantage; but the bank is equally a loser in both cases.