individual who would readjust his conduct in the light of changed interests finds that active opposition is met in the emotional accompaniment of the old habits. The economic society may wish to be free from a money whose original value is gone, but there is a powerful debtor interest which approves of that money, and whose support tends to maintain its value. All these possibilities I admit. My own theory of value, which finds the roots of economic value ramifying through the total social psychological situation, rather than in utility or labor-pain alone, involves possibilities like these. But--and this is a point I wish especially to stress--we are out of the field of mechanics, and in the field of social psychology, when we undertake to explain the value of money that way. No longer is there any mathematical necessity about the matter. There is no such _a priori_ simplicity as the quantity theory deals with. Factors like these might maintain the value of money for a time, and then wane. These factors might vary in intensity from day to day, with changing political or other events, leading the value of money to change from day to day, quite irrespective of changes in its quantity.[120] In so far as you have a people ignorant of the nature of money and of monetary problems, a people in the bonds of custom, with slightly developed commercial life, whose economic activities run in familiar grooves unreflectively, you will most nearly approximate a situation like that which Professor Kemmerer assumes. But that means that what might be true in India, or to a less degree in Austria--countries to which the quantity theorists are accustomed to refer--need not at all be true in the United States. Here everybody was talking about the theory of money in 1896--not necessarily very intelligently!--and here, moreover, such phrases as "good as gold," and propositions like that which came from Mr. J. P. Morgan in his testimony before the Pujo Committee that "gold is money, and nothing else," would seem to indicate that a very great part of our people might utterly distrust such a money as Professor Kemmerer describes. The banker's tendency to look behind for the security, to test things out, to seek to get to bed-rock in business affairs, holds with a great many people. An overemphasis on this is responsible for the doctrine of Scott[121] and Laughlin[122] that the sole source of the value of inconvertible paper money is the prospect of redemption, and that inconvertible paper money differs from gold in value by an amount which exactly equals the discount at the prevailing rate of interest, with allowance for risk, for the period during which people expect the paper money to remain unredeemed. We have not the banker's psychology to any such extent as that. Apart from the fact that the money function adds to the value of money, under certain circumstances,--a point to be elaborated shortly--other, non-rational