There was a check on this system of creating new artificial paper money by the banks (for this is what it came to), and the check consisted in the control of the Government over the National Bank--in England the Bank of England. There was a law preventing the Bank of England from issuing more than a certain number of notes in proportion to the gold lying behind them, and the private banks could not issue over-drafts, or loans, indefinitely, because they could not get more than a certain amount of paper money from the Bank of England to meet the payments they had to make, and the Bank, in its turn, could not issue more than a certain proportion of paper money against its gold. So ultimately the amount of real money, the gold, in the hands of the banks, both national and private, acted as a check upon this creation of false money by the banks. But when gold payments ceased with the Great War that check broke down, and even if gold payments had not ceased, the power of the banks thus to “create” as it is called,--in other words, their power to say to any individual enterprise: “You shall or you shall not have your cheques honoured: you shall or you shall not carry on”--gave them an immense and increasing power over the community. That is why the revolt against the banking system and its control over our lives in the modern state since the war is becoming so formidable. It has two chief forms against which men protest. 1. The bankers can decide, of two competitors, which shall survive. As the great majority of enterprises lie in debt to the banks--that is, carrying on with loans allowed them by the banks working with money _made_ by the banks--any one of two competing industries can be killed by the bankers saying: “I will no longer lend you this money. I ‘call it in’--that is, ask for it to be paid at once. But I will not exercise the same pressure upon the man who is competing against you.” This power makes the banks the masters of the greater part of modern industry. It is argued that the banks do not act from caprice, and will naturally only back a sound enterprise and only ruin an unsound one. That is, on the whole, true. But still, those who command them have the power, if they like, to act from caprice, and whenever you give a few human beings great power of this sort over millions of others it tends to be abused.