Cheques are to be regarded as our national currency, bills of exchange are to be regarded as international currency. Cheques are wealth converted into national currency. When a bank discounts bills it enables them to perform also all the functions of our national currency. Until they are so discounted their functions are limited to their international purposes. This is one of the purposes served in re-discounting them with the joint stock banks. The great bill-broking firms and discount houses discount them on behalf of customers and re-discount them with banks. It is in the re-discounting that they make their profits and continue their existence. They cannot tie up their capital in these investments. They must re-discount them in order to liquefy them and restore their capital. And all the vast wealth behind the bills thereby becomes liquid capital that can continue fructifying instead of becoming stagnant. Now this wealth, I say, the banks indirectly possess. It is theirs. They buy it. And if they buy it and it comes into their possession and they exchange money for it, as merchants and tradesmen do, how do they grant credit? When the wealth is eventually sold the proceeds go into the coffers of the banks, and the banks hand over the promises to pay. But the promises to pay are more tangible than the promises of the schemer who flits from suburb to suburb and town to town living on what is called credit. Then there is the other composite wealth amounting to over £16,000,000. These are advances to tradesmen, merchants, and other persons well known to bank managers, who deposit some kind of wealth as security. They are loans to all sorts of people who have pledged all sorts of wealth with banks. This wealth, in other words, they have liquefied and the banks have been paid consideration for liquefying it. People have parted with the wealth, sold it, if you like, and it has been passed over into the possession of the banks. Adding these to the other loans we make a total of nearly £22,000,000, which compose that portion of the deposits which we call loan deposits. If we add the bills discounted as another form of loan the total is raised to £28,700,000 out of a total of £37,600,000 of deposits. This leaves a residue of £9,000,000 of pure deposits against which the bank holds £6,000,000 of legal tender, or over 60 per cent. If we add the £6,000,000 of investments, the total considerably exceeds the aggregate of the pure deposits.