The Mexican governments, one after the other, have lent what prestige they had to a proposed and elaborate new banking law, based on a “Sole Bank of Issue.” From Carranza’s time the men in charge of the government finances apparently believed that this system could be established on the wrecks of the ruined Banks of Issue. Up to the present this has not yet been attempted, for Mexico was and is in no mood to receive any form of paper currency or government banking, however it may be guaranteed. It was inevitable, after the banks were closed, that the country should go back to a metallic basis. This was made more difficult, however, by the government’s decree, recently reiterated in the summer of 1921, making illegal the circulation of American silver and banknotes. This plan, although it brought out the Mexican gold and silver which had been hoarded, inevitably cut down the circulating medium of the country to absolutely inadequate proportions, even though American money could easily have been obtained to provide enough currency to tide over the crisis. There were many difficulties connected with the establishment of gold and silver again, but most of them had to do with the scarcity of these mediums. There was a further complication for which no one was responsible. This was the phenomenal rise in the price of silver during the Great War. This early became a crisis, for first the silver pesos became more valuable as bullion than the fifty cents (American money) at which they had been fixed in the time of Diaz, and soon even the subsidiary coins, of a lower silver content, became worth more than their legal value in gold. The export of silver coins had to be stopped by government order, and under the guidance of American monetary experts the recoinage of silver in smaller pieces was begun. To-day this money is in general circulation, accepted at face value for the simple and deliberately created reason that it is issued only as the crying demands of business for change force it out. The new pesos are about half the bullion value of the old, and the subsidiary coins are even less valuable in proportion. Needless to say, this change in the size of the silver coins had an unfavorable effect on the public mind, already on edge over the various financial coups of the Carranza government. This was aggravated by a destructive form of favoritism by which a few men were allowed, under Carranza, to buy up and export the old silver coins, a form of graft which amazes and disgusts the observer and also, be it noted, made the money shortage greater and less easy to endure.