This result can only be achieved by enforcing the discount rate throughout the country involved; and the discount rate can only be enforced throughout the country involved by buying and selling bills of exchange in straight gold transactions. We should not trade one bank credit for another bank credit, and put this bank credit into our bank reserves, as the Aldrich scheme proposed, thereby driving gold out of the banks, and out of the country, and also utterly destroying our power to control and protect the cash gold reserves of our banks, which outside of what may be called subsidiary money (from $2 pieces down), should ultimately and always be _gold and gold alone_. In conclusion, I submit that the whole plan as we've worked it out does not introduce a single foreign element but creates out of our own practices, which have developed out of our own peculiar conditions, a financial and banking system, founded upon sound economic principles. It gradually eliminates those errors that have crept into our financial and banking practices, possibly through supposed necessity, but certainly through ignorance; and yet, the present incoherent conglomerate condition is brought to a simplicity and strength that may safely challenge any country in the world to institute a comparison for economy, efficiency, strength and safety. MR. MERCHANT: Gentlemen, if you will achieve the results that you have outlined in the course of this evening's talk, you will accomplish all and precisely what Mr. MacVeagh, Secretary of the Treasury, recently described as the ends that must be attained if we are to bring about a complete financial and banking reform. These are his words: "A relief measure reforming the banking and currency system must include, among its necessary features, provisions for never-failing reserves and never-failing currency, and for the perfect elasticity and flexibility of both; for the permanent organization and organized coöperation of the banks, which are now suffering and causing the nation to suffer by reason of their unorganized state; for a central agency, to represent and act for the organized and coöperative banks--this agency to be securely free from political or trust control, but with the Government having adequate and intimate supervision of it; for independent banking units--so independent that no one bank can be owned, controlled, or shared in in any degree, directly or indirectly, by any other bank; for the equality of all banks, National or State, both as to standards and as to functions--so that every requirement made of a National bank must be complied with equally by a State bank, and every function or privilege enjoyed by a State bank shall be enjoyed by a National bank; for the utilization and the fluidity of bank assets; for the scientific development of exchanges--domestic and foreign; for foreign banking as an adjunct of our foreign commerce, and for taking the Treasury Department out of the banking business."