But the banks have to keep an eye on that gold reserve, watch it closely. Managers have to calculate when the limit of their conversion powers will be reached, and when it is reached their wealth-liquefying machinery has for the time being to cease working. It does not follow that when the machinery of one bank has to stop, the machinery of all the banks simultaneously stops. The limit may not yet have been reached in other banks. Borrowers, as they are called, then rush to them, and as the numbers grow and the pressure increases, so is the limit of the other banks more speedily reached, until at last the entire machinery comes to a stop. It often comes to a stop when in the interests of the economic welfare of the nation it should be working most actively. But the machinery is controlled by another independent agency, and the economic interests of the nation must suffer the effects of this obtrusive force. If this independent force be at times harmful and not beneficial to the economic welfare and progress of the nation, what is to be said of the cry that this force, in the most urgent times, should be made more interfering and harmful? What is to be said of the cry that at the moment when the need is greatest then the succour should be restricted? What should we say of the doctor who by ligatures prevented the free flow of blood in the body of an active, energetic man, in order to paralyse his energies and enforce rest? We should say that he was not only an unscientific doctor, ignorant of the functions of the bodily organism, but that he was actually killing his patient. These gold reserves, therefore, act like ligatures, for they stop the free and health-giving flow of economic blood at the very moment when the flow should be stimulated. In inactive times we see the metamorphosis of the fund take place. The loan deposits decrease, because the liquefied wealth becomes frozen again and the production of wealth decreases, while the pure deposits grow. The fact that the loan deposits decrease simultaneously with the contraction of wealth production is an additional proof that the loanable fund is wealth in liquid form. As the wealth in fixed form is withdrawn from the bank so the loan deposits drop. Now the increased pure deposits may be regarded as a portion of the harvests gathered from the fructifying use of the liquid capital in times of activity. They are called the profits, or the savings of capital. They accumulate in times of depression. For lack of other employment they are placed on deposit with the banks. They are, in a way, loaned to the banks, and the banks are supposed to lend this money to the classes of borrowers already described. But the banks at these times benefit, or are presumed to benefit, not because the aggregate of the deposits grow enormously compared with other periods, but because these pure deposits bring them more gold. The loan deposits take gold, the pure deposits bring gold.