“Mr. D. M. Mason the previous night urged the Government to withdraw the Treasury notes now in circulation here. He (Mr. Chamberlain) had held for a long time that gold in the pockets of the people was not a very useful reserve for any national purpose, that we carried about the same amount of gold whether it was a time of crisis or not, and that that gold was not readily made available for the international currency when the need for it in that capacity arose. Therefore, he held that the internal circulation of gold was, on the whole, wasteful use of it, that it was an out of date use of gold, and that the greatest development of our financial system had been the substitution of paper for gold. The largest substitution had been in the form of the cheque. Provided that the issue of notes was not an artificial inflation of the currency but a response to a real need for currency, then the more they could substitute notes for gold for internal use the better, and the more economical, the more civilized, and the more advanced the currency system became. What he cared about was seeing a large reserve of gold centralized for use in an emergency, and if they had secured the reserve of gold and the emergency arose, then the most foolish thing they could do was to fail to use the gold. The gold was got together in order that in an emergency, when the exchange went against them, the adverse balance of the exchanges might be corrected by the use of the gold, and unless the gold were used in that way it seemed to be a pure waste of it to hold it in reserve. That was not a doctrine that was popular in any foreign country that he knew. But it was a sound doctrine, and he hoped that the whole influence that we could bring, through the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the councils of the Allies would be directed to making them use their gold resources freely when those gold resources were required. They had to study the psychology of the people. If the Government used their gold freely they very soon restored confidence in the public mind. He hoped that our influence would be used to persuade our Allies that in this matter the boldest course was the safest course, and that States were as unwise to hoard gold as individuals within States were.” (Hear, hear.)