Articles of merchandise and raw materials are produced in order that they may be consumed. They would not be produced if there were no prospect of consumption. It is consumption that confers value upon products. If products were not converted into wealth they would perish; they would be valueless. There must be a desire for them. If there were no desire for them, labour and capital would not be spent upon consuming them. A desire must exist before production, or production must bring a desire into being. And when that desire becomes active, as distinct from passive, its activity becomes consumption. We know that in states of trade depression the markets are stocked with unconsumed and unconsumable commodities, and these commodities cannot, in the strict sense of the idea, be called wealth. They are perishing, they are valueless, because no one wants them, and vendors of these commodities face loss and sometimes ruin. They try every art known to them to stimulate desire for them in order to get that desire manifested in purchasing them. To increase wealth we must necessarily increase production and consumption; in other words, increase supply and demand. This is the economic object of all civilized nations. This wealth it is their object to convert into money, for money is the reproductive product of wealth. Wealth cannot become reproductive, except in a most limited sense, unless it is converted into reproductive form, and banks supply not the entire, but the chief machinery for changing it into this form. If, therefore, their chief function is to change wealth into reproductive form, it is not creating credit. Money is like the fruit ripened into seed. Fruits of the earth must be ripened into seed before they can reproduce their kind. If they perish before then, they do not become reproductive. When this new seed is sown in the earth, to be gathered into ripened fruit at the next harvest, it performs the same function that money performs when it circulates. It reproduces and multiplies itself, and the harvest springing up from it is new wealth. The more wealth, therefore, that is transformed and reproduced and that multiplies, the richer, we say, a country becomes. Therefore, it follows that the transforming machinery should work with pace equalling the creation of wealth if the country is to reap the best harvests from its work. For every pound’s worth of wealth coming into existence the means should be provided for transforming it into a pound’s worth of money. So far, the best means discovered is the cheque system. No legal tender system, based upon gold, could provide these essential means, because gold is not provided sufficiently, and cannot be provided sufficiently. The machinery we need can be made with no precious metal. If we desire perfect machinery, it is indisputable that no machinery could do the work so efficiently as paper machinery.