Between 1896 and 1904, as officially reported, the increase in the volume of visible money was, in millions, $1,322,000,000—or $9.75 per capita; but the quantity of hocus pocus money in use increased $5,275,000,000—or $43.42 per capita—the quantity of both kinds then actually in use being $107.63 per capita. This shows that four-fifths of the increase in the medium of exchange consists merely of the right given favored people to draw checks on banks to pay which no real money has been deposited. In 1888, 5,866 bank reports showed that they were then collecting interest on $3.41 for each dollar of their capital available for “commercial loans”; but last year’s reports of the 13,772 national, state and private banks and loan and trust companies show that their aggregate capital (including surplus, undivided profits and bank-notes) amounted to $2,927,000,000. This was everything their owners had put into their business, and of it $2,743,000,000 had been paid out for bonds, stocks, real estate, real estate mortgages, etc., leaving only $183,000,000 available for “commercial loans.” And yet their “loans and discounts” aggregated $6,431,000,000, or $35.07 of “commercial loans” for every dollar of their not otherwise invested capital. If this is not “_getting something for nothing_” on a stupendous scale, I should like to know what would be so considered. Remember, that these figures include all of the reported banks. Individual cases are incomparably worse. On December 2, 1899, the National City Bank, of New York City (the principal of the several hundred Standard Oil banks), had $6,709,216 of capital, surplus, etc.; its investments of capital aggregated $27,270,738; its available capital was therefore $20,561,519 _less than nothing_; and yet it was then actually earning interest on $60,906,034 of “loans and discounts,” making $81,467,553 of hocus pocus money. And remember further that, to make people more dependent on banks for this kind of money with which to do business, the volume of real money is kept as small as possible. This is the real reason why bankers engineered the contraction of the currency after the war and the demonetization of silver. But for them no class of business men would have consented to either of those economic crimes. Here are a few more important facts: 1. Interest has to be paid _to the banks_ on every dollar of hocus pocus money as long as it lives. 2. It lives, on an average, only about two months. 3. Every payment of a note or draft extinguishes the hocus pocus money involved in that transaction and contracts its volume that much, making it the most constantly and wildly fluctuating money ever known. 4. Whenever, for any reason, bankers fear a demand for an unusual amount of real money they make fewer “loans” and “call in” some that are outstanding, which destroys that part of the “liquid capital” that was in actual use as a medium of exchange and cramps the money market.