It is not necessary here to examine in detail the various forms taken by this new paper currency. It is enough to point out that it enables property to be transferred and manipulated far more rapidly and on far larger a scale than was previously possible[10]. Only one other point in the history of the new currency needs to be here mentioned. It cannot be better expressed than in the words used by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the House of Commons on November 28th, 1914: I have been much struck since I have been dealing with these transactions (bills of exchange) with how little even traders who form a part of this great machinery know about the mechanism of which they form an essential part.... I do not think that the general public—and I am putting myself among them—ever realized the extent to which the business not merely of this country, but of the whole world, depended upon this very delicate and complicated paper machinery. Apparently it needed a European war to bring home to the modern world of commerce the nature of its currency. This fact should warn us against expecting to find in early Greece any very clear recognition of the revolution in the currency that then took place. When gold and silver coins were first circulated they had a corresponding effect to the modern issues of paper. They enabled property to be transferred with greater ease and rapidity. We may be sure however that the character and possibilities of the new currency did not at once receive universal recognition[11]. The merchants in the bazaars of Lydia and Ionia who best understood how to make use of it must have profited enormously. [Sidenote: and led many people to fear a new tyranny of wealth.] The experts in the new finance of the last two generations have been exercising a profound influence upon politics and government. There are many people, particularly in America, who believe that there is a possibility of this influence becoming supreme. It is worth while quoting a few of these opinions: This era is but a passing phase in the evolution of industrial Caesars, and these Caesars will be of a new type—corporate Caesars[12]. The flames of a new economic evolution run around us, and we turn to find that competition has killed competition, that corporations are grown greater than the state and have bred individuals greater than themselves, and that the naked issue of our time is with property becoming master instead of servant[13]. For some months past the sugar trust has been the Government of the United States[14]. In 1884 there seems even to have been an idea of running a Standard Oil senator for the United States presidency. “Henry B. Payne is looming up grandly in the character of a possible and not altogether improbable successor to Mr Tilden as the Democratic candidate for the presidency[15].”