If you sold a man a horse for fifty pounds, you were just as willing to take ten five pound notes for him as fifty sovereigns. They were more convenient to carry, and you knew that whenever you wanted the actual gold you had only to go to the bank and get it. Because people were thus willing to be paid in paper instead of in the actual gold, a large number of notes could be kept in circulation at any one time, and only a small amount of gold had to be kept in readiness at the Bank to redeem them. In practice it was found that very much less gold than the notes stood for was quite enough to meet the notes as they were brought in for payment. Much the most of the note circulation went on going the rounds, and in normal times it took a long time for a note on the average to be brought back to the Bank. You can see that this dodge of paper money had the effect of increasing the total _amount_ of the current medium in practice, and of greatly increasing its Efficiency in Circulation. Moreover, it made the Efficiency in Circulation very elastic, because in times of quiet business, more notes would go out of circulation and be paid into the bank, while in time of active business more notes would go on circulating. _So long as every note was redeemed in gold every time it was brought to the bank, so long as the promise to pay was promptly kept, the money still remained good; the paper currency did not interfere with the reality of the gold values, there was no upsetting of prices, and all went well._ Unfortunately, Governments are under a great temptation, when they have exceptionally heavy expenses, to falsify the Currency. People get so much in the habit of trusting the Government stamp on paper or metal that they take it as part of nature. What the Government is really doing when it coins a sovereign is giving a guarantee that this little disc of yellow metal contains 123 grains of gold with a certain known (and small) amount of alloy to make the gold hard. When the Government has to pay a large amount in wages, or for its Army and Navy, or what not, it is tempted to put in less gold and more alloy and keep the old stamp unchanged, and that is called “Debasing the Currency.”