customers credits enabling them to draw cheques amounts in fact to an increase in the currency just as much as the power of the Bank of England to print legal tender notes, and the power of the Government to print Treasury notes. Thus it has happened that by the evolution of the banking system the use of the precious metals as currency has been reinforced and expanded by the printing of an enormous mass of pieces of paper, whether in the form of notes, or in the form of cheques, which economise the use of gold, but have hitherto always been based on the fact that they are convertible into gold on demand, and in fact have only been accepted because of this important proviso. Gold as currency was so convenient and perfect that its perfection has been improved upon by this ingenious device, which prevented its actually passing from hand to hand as currency, and substituted for it an enormous mass of pieces of paper which were promises to pay it, if ever the holders of the paper chose to exercise their power to demand it. By this method gold has been enabled to circulate in the form of paper substitutes to an extent which its actual amount would have made altogether impossible if it had had to do its circulation, so to speak, in its own person. From the application of this great economy to gold two consequences have followed; the first is that the effectiveness of gold as a standard of value has been weakened because this power that banks have given to it of circulating by substitute has obviously depreciated its value by enormously multiplying the effective supply of it. Depreciation in the buying power of money, and a consequent rise in prices, has consequently been a factor which has been almost constantly at work for centuries with occasional reactions, during which the process went the other way. Another consequence has been that people, seeing the ease with which pieces of paper can be multiplied, representing a right to gold which is only in exceptional cases exercised, have proceeded to ask whether there is really any necessity to have gold behind the paper at all, and whether it would not be possible to evolve some ideal form of super-paper which could take the place of gold as the basis of the ordinary paper which is created by the machinery of credit, which would be made exchangeable into it on demand instead of into gold.