Having analysed a typical bank balance sheet, we are able to see the kind of business a bank conducts and the valuable functions it performs on behalf of the community. A bank is in reality a manufacturer of currency--not of legal tender currency, but the currency of custom. The Government does not provide this necessary machinery, so the banks provide it, and we can imagine what would happen to the country if the machinery broke down, or if it were compulsorily stopped. This custom currency has become so much an integral part of the economic and financial structure of the country, that even our tax-gatherers will accept a cheque as readily as sovereigns. Our currency is to all intents and purposes a paper currency, the soundness of which is rarely questioned. It is not legal tender currency, but it is as vital to the well-being of the nation as legal tender currency. The other paper currency is Bank of England notes and, since the war, Treasury £1 and 10_s._ notes. Even though the whole of these notes may not be convertible into cash, they are legal tender simply and solely because the legislature has enacted that they shall be legal tender. This is, of course, something outside custom. If the legislature were pleased to do so, it could enact that cheques on certain specified banks should be legal tender, just as it arbitrarily enacted that the new Treasury notes, issued without any gold backing at first, should be legal tender, equal to the amount of their face value in gold. I wish to emphasize the distinction, therefore, between the currency of custom--something that has grown up out of the needs of the community, something essential to its welfare and progress, the product of an advanced stage of economics and of civilization--and the currency called legal tender. Though debts are paid and are payable in custom currency, the power of this currency to redeem debt could be destroyed in certain circumstances, the circumstances of a panic. They may be remote circumstances, but, remote as they are, they raise deep problems which to this day are discussed with energy and heat. Ought the Government to provide machinery more adequate than that it does provide to meet the currency needs of the nation? This is one aspect of the problem. Some say it ought to provide it, some say this does not come within its province. It is left to the banks to provide that currency as best they may and quite apart from their methods of providing it, it is indisputable that they administer to a vital economic need. If, therefore, they administer to that need, should the Government come to their assistance in those circumstances which cause a collapse of their machinery?