Every detail of the banking business will undergo a marked change because of this change of motive. Yet there need be no serious division of opinion as to the financial technique that will best promote the new purpose. The changes of practice concerning discount rates, note issues, metallic reserves, etc., will follow logically and obviously from the conception that the business of the bank is not the accumulation of enforceable claim against the public, but rather the husbanding of the public estate. Banking, under any and all systems, is chiefly a matter of exchanging specific personal claims for general social claims. The bank receives personal debt-certificates and gives back certificates of social-debt or documentary claims against society at large. Personal credits at the bank are, in effect, charges against the public. Sound banking consists in not overcharging the public. The mystery that shrouds all banking problems is due to the obscuring of the fundamental fact that banking has become, under modern conditions, the most vital social function; it determines the obligations owed by society to the individual and so fixes every man’s status and power. It is absurd that such a social function should be performed without social responsibility and solely for the sake of a speculative private profit. The proposal is, therefore, that the revolution shall establish in Mexico the first banking system in the world deserving to be called modern. For no excellence of banking machinery can atone for the fact that throughout the whole circle of commerce, private credits and the corresponding public obligations are being measured and registered by men whose interest is quite separate from that of the public. The proposed identification of the banking interest with the public interest does not necessarily imply that banks should be administered by political officials. It is indeed necessary, as an exigency of the revolution, that the new bank of Mexico should be backed by the highest political authority. But the real point is that modern banking will reach a normal development only when banking has become a responsible profession--in the analogy of law and medicine at their highest level. In the long run it will be found that a sound, democratic, financial system is to be regarded as the creator rather than the creature of democratic government.