"And why should I not have?" asked Norrena. "These principles have been tried in this country and we know by experience that they cannot fail, wherever they are intelligently and honestly applied, on a scale large enough to constitute one good object lesson as to what can be accomplished. The system, in practice, will demonstrate that money is not a necessity. Money however, will still come into your hands, even more freely, and as long as you have debts that must be paid in money, you will have use for it. But when the debts are all paid, money might cease to circulate, as you would then have learned by actual experience, that you would get along better without it than with it." "That puts me in mind," I said, "that in your lecture you stated that the people in this country, in their movement to establish equity in business, established banks to manage their money account. If the movement here was started by the very poor, how did they get money for the necessary cash capital?" "By the accumulation from cash purchases made in their exchanges," said Norrena. "Their exchanges were a system of banking products, but they issued checks on the deposit of money as well as products. As these exchanges offered superior inducements, they received their full share of cash trade from the beginning, and nearly all of it when their exchange was complete. Hence they found no difficulty in establishing their own banks under the law, and as they never loaned their deposits, their banks could not break, and people who had money to deposit, brought it to them for safe keeping. As the tendency of this locking up of deposits was to curtail the circulation of money, the exchanges provided against any oppressive stringency, by loaning on good security, without interest, checks which were redeemable in products at the exchanges. It was estimated by the statisticians of that time, that every dollar locked up in the exchange banks, brought six dollars of trade per annum to the exchange stores on which the regular customers at these exchanges made an average of ten per cent., or sixty per cent. upon deposits." "Were these exchanges incorporated as joint stock companies?" I asked.