It will be seen that the fixing of £14,000,000 as the basis of the note issue against securities, and not against gold, was a purely arbitrary sum. No matter how it was arrived at, nothing will alter its arbitrariness, and up to the present there has been no suspicion of ill, uneconomic results from this arbitrary figure. And being an arbitrary figure there seems to be no overwhelmingly strong reason why it should not be extended within judicious limits. We must bear in mind that in 1844 national and international commerce were not on the mighty scale they are now. We must bear in mind that the population of this country and its output of wealth were greatly less than they are now, and greatly less than they will be in the future, and if this arbitrary figure was judicious and safe in the first half of the nineteenth century, and in the second half too, a higher figure should be equally as judicious and safe half a century hence. When we deal with a currency system in an arbitrary manner and control its workings in an arbitrary way, it is opposed to a scientific way. A scientific method may be an impossible method in a delicate system like currency, and therefore, if we must rely upon arbitrariness, this method can be made elastic and adjustable in a cautious, judicious way. In 1844 banking was in its infancy. It has grown since then, but we cannot with assurance predict what developments are ahead of it, and fifty years hence the nation may look back upon the present system in much the same way as we look back to conditions half a century ago. We find that during the past fifty or sixty years the currency system of the country has gone through a tremendous metamorphosis. The banknote system--excepting the legal tender notes--has practically disappeared, and another paper currency has taken its place. This is the cheque currency, the real currency of the country, because it is representative of the wealth of the country, as currency should be. It grows with the country’s wealth and shrinks with the country’s wealth, and this is precisely the automatic function an ideal currency should perform. A perfect currency should simultaneously expand and contract with the output and exchange of wealth, because a perfect currency should be that wealth in liquid form. Let us for a moment examine what wealth is. Wealth has been defined by many economists, and the definitions and formulas have differed greatly. But we can be more in agreement, perhaps, as to how wealth actually comes into existence. Wealth is the product of two forces, and it cannot come into existence unless these forces interact. These forces are production and consumption. Wealth is not the product of production only, nor of consumption only. We cannot consume what has not come into existence, what has not been produced. We can produce without consumption, but it is consumption that converts it into wealth.