For European banks, the case is equally clear. European bankers deny any intention of keeping any definite reserve ratio. This appeared very clearly in the "Interviews" obtained for the Monetary Commission with leading European bankers.[174] The Banque de France increased its gold reserves, between 1899 and 1910, by 75%, but increased its discounts and advances during the same period by only 5%.[175] J. M. Keynes[176] points out that the reserves of the great banks of the world, and of Treasuries which act as central banks, have absorbed an enormous part of the gold produced in the fifteen years before the War, increasing their holdings from about five hundred million pounds sterling in 1900 to one billion pounds sterling at the outbreak of the War. "The object of these accumulations has been only dimly conceived by the owners of them. They have been piled up partly as the result of blind fashion, partly as the almost _automatic consequence_, in an era of abundant gold supply, of the particular currency arrangements which it has been orthodox to introduce.... The ratios of gold to liabilities vary very extremely from one country to another, without always being explicable by reference to the varying circumstances of those countries.... The contingencies, against which a gold reserve is held, are necessarily so vague that the problem of assessing the proper ratio must be, within wide limits, indeterminate. It is natural, therefore, that bankers, who must act one way or the other, should often fall back on mere usage or accept _that amount of gold as sufficient_ which, _if they are chiefly passive, the tides of gold bring them_. [Italics mine.] At any rate, the management of gold reserves is not yet a science in most countries. There is no ideal virtue in the present level of these reserves. Countries have got on in the past with much less, and under force of circumstances could do so again." It will be noticed that Keynes, in the passage cited, is speaking of _gold_ reserves, while Fisher's contention relates to all kinds of money available for reserves, which in this country would include gold, silver dollars, greenbacks, and, for many State banks, the notes of national banks. He is also talking of the relation of reserves to demand _liabilities_, which for most great European banks are primarily notes, rather than of reserves to deposits. But as an exposition of the theory of the ratio of reserves to deposits (the chief liability of American banks), it is applicable to American conditions, and as a statement of the facts, it of course gives a basis for testing Fisher's doctrine generally. I do not think that Fisher's fixed ratio, as between reserves and deposits, or even the ratio which more moderate quantity theorists might seek to find between gold and demand liabilities, will find any justification in the facts of banking history.[177]