Sir Edward Holden, in one of those masterly surveys of world finance with which he now instructs the shareholders of the London Joint City and Midland Bank, assembled at their annual meeting, gave much of his attention to an attack on the report of Lord Cunliffe's Committee on Currency. This was only to be expected, since the Committee had made recommendations on lines which were largely conservative and did not embody any of the reforms or changes which had been previously advocated by Sir Edward. Being on this occasion chiefly critical, he did not make very clear in his latest speech the precise proposals that he favours. For them we have to go back to his speech of a year ago, as reported in the _Economist_ of February 2, 1918, p. 171, where he stated that "if the Bank (of England) had been working on the same principles as other national banks of issue, there would have been little ground for anxiety," and that these principles are:-- 1. One bank of issue and not divided into departments. 2. Notes are created and issued on the security of bills of exchange and on the cash balance, so that a relation is established between the notes issued and the discounts. 3. The notes issued are controlled by a fixed ratio of gold to notes or of the cash balance to notes. 4. This fixed ratio may be lowered by the payment of a tax. 5. The notes should not exceed three times the gold or the cash balance. As will be remembered, the Cunliffe Committee recommended that the division of the Bank of England into an Issue Department and a Banking Department, should be retained; that the old principle by which above a certain fixed limit all notes should be backed by gold, should also be retained, but that if at any time a breach of this rule should be found necessary it should be possible, with the consent of the Treasury, and that Bank rate "should be raised to a rate sufficiently high to secure the earliest possible retirement of the excess issue." Since it was formerly only possible to exceed the limit on the fiduciary issue by a breach of the law, under the Chancellor of the Exchequer's promise to get an indemnity for it from Parliament, and since Treasury tradition insisted on a 10 per cent. Bank rate whenever such a breach was permitted or contemplated, it will be seen that the Cunliffe Committee proposed some considerable modifications in our system and hardly justified Sir Edward's assertion that it "proposed that the Bank should continue to work under the Act of 1844 as heretofore."