The additional price, thus received, is of no advantage to the producer or to the seller of the commodity. The addition to the price is consumed by losses from bad debts and in interest on capital. In fact, the additional prices charged, when properly analyzed, are not for the goods, but for the risk on the credit and for interest on capital. The net selling price of the commodity is not increased. Experience has proven that men who sell for the lesser price for cash in hand are more apt to succeed than those who charge the higher rate on the credit system. Credit is always burdened with interest. If interest is not directly charged, the goods are sold at an advance on the cash price equal to the interest, which amounts to the same thing. Interest acts on commerce like friction on machinery. As friction absorbs a portion of the motive power, so interest absorbs a part of the value of all commodities sold on credit. Interest, the necessary accompaniment of credit, produces no wealth; but, on the contrary, absorbs wealth and tends to concentrate it in the hands of the few; and, necessarily, in the same ratio it takes from the masses the power to purchase the things they desire and would otherwise consume. Its ultimate result must be to lower prices. Credit burdened with interest, as it always is, may temporarily increase the demand for a certain commodity and consequently temporarily raise its price; but it must do this at the expense of other commodities. Like a stimulant administered to a human being, it may produce spasmodic results of extraordinary power; but when the stimulant has spent its force it leaves the individual weaker and in a worse condition than he was before the stimulant was administered. Henry Thornton, an English economist, attempts to prove that a bill of exchange is money, and that, being money, it acts on prices. He says: Let us imagine a farmer in the country to discharge a debt of £10 to his neighboring grocer by giving him a bill for that sum, drawn on his corn-factor in London, for grain sold in the metropolis; and the grocer to transmit the bill, he having previously indorsed it, to a neighboring sugar-baker in discharge of a like debt; and the sugar-baker to send it, when again indorsed, to a West India merchant in an outport; and the West India merchant to deliver it to his country banker, who also indorses it and sends it into further circulation. The bill in this case will have effected five payments, exactly as if it were a £10 note payable to the bearer on demand. A multitude of bills pass this way between traders in the country, in the manner which has been described; _and they evidently form in the strictest sense a part of the circulating medium of the kingdom_. Mill in his "Political Economy" quotes this illustration with approval. Is the conclusion arrived at correct?