Greenbacks and National Bank Notes of the United States could be studied with advantage. There has never been any difficulty in maintaining a certain amount of inconvertible paper money in circulation; and with the growth of monetary knowledge and the advance of civilisation this amount would be an ever increasing quantity. Sufficient has now been said to show the direction in which a just and rational control of England's currency system should be exercised. That the Great Power which enters so intimately into the lives of every member of the State, and which so largely influences human thought and action, should be made and issued with practically no regard for its several functions, and for the parts those functions play in the development and advancement of the State, is an example of ignorance and neglect of which it is impossible to find a parallel in any other department of modern governments. The clear intelligence of the people of England, and their inborn love of justice and fair play, could never have permitted such a discreditable condition of affairs to exist had not their attentions and energies been directed towards the practical building up of their empire with such tools as their rulers supplied to them, rather than to a consideration of the nature and peculiarities of the tools themselves. Now that the superiority of these monetary instruments is questioned, the people of Great Britain will not be long to perceive that their inability to keep pace with certain rival nations arises not from any want of energy or intelligence, but mainly from the defective and inadequate currency machinery by the aid of which they work. CHAPTER XII. Details to be considered in the improvement of England's monetary system-The Currency Department of State-The money of the future. "A perfect and a just measure shalt thou have." DEUT. XXV. 15. HAT a legally recognised Public Measure THAT should be liable to unexpected fluctuations is an anomaly that ought no longer to be tolerated. Not only do such fluctuations inflict most serious injustices upon large classes of the community, but, involving as they do deficiency or excess of Stimulus and variations in the strength of the Great Purchasing Power, the progress of every branch of commerce is affected, and the welfare of. the whole nation disturbed. The agricultural and manufacturing classes, a portion of whose expenses are more or less fixed by custom or contract, no matter how the value of money may vary, are now suffering from a diminution in profits arising from a serious expansion in the Public, Measure of Value. The banking and money-lending classes, whose welfare is inseparably bound up with that of the agricultural and manufacturing classes, are also suffering from a diminution in profits arising from the fall in rates of interest consequent upon what appears to be a plethora of money, but what is in fact a relative decrease in the demand for money-relative, when compared with the growth of the demand for money in the United States and elsewhere. The arguments already employed show that no improvement in this condition of general malaise can be expected so long as the supply of England's money is left to chance, and no effort whatever is made to control the Great Power. As a wide recognition of this fact will undoubtedly lead to an imperative call for monetary reform, it will be of interest to trace the lines upon which such reform should be made, in order to most benefit the people of the United Kingdom and best advance the prosperity of the British Empire. It must be remembered that in the use and circulation of any particular kind of money, force of habit and social convention exert a very powerful influence. The great majority of the world's inhabitants have no theories, or indeed any information at all, upon the subject of money, and they are consequently guided solely by tradition and popular report. Those who have been accustomed to money of paper, generally prefer paper; those who have always handled silver, find silver money quite satisfactory; whilst those who are more familiar with gold, prefer money of this latter metal. It has always been a matter of some difficulty to induce the less informed to accept any coins or system of money which, although perhaps thoroughly sound, is not familiar to them; and this will be the great difficulty with which the legislators of England will have to contend when the question of monetary reform receives practical consideration. The genuine commiseration which an honest British Tar once expressed for certain French adversaries, whom he imagined to be handicapped by the (to him) queer language in which they received their orders, is somewhat in the nature of the spirit with which Englishmen of the present day are apt to regard the currency systems of foreign nations. Feelings of this kind are after all the outcome of a lack of information, and although they may do honour to the Englishman's appreciation of justice and fair play, they will hardly help him to hold his own when the weapons by aid of which he himself is fighting are not of the best that science can produce. The first step, then, is to convince him of the defects in his own monetary tools, and at the same time to enlighten him as to the progress of those rivals who have employed tools of a different manufacture. An attempt in this direction has been made in the present work. Sir Courtenay Boyle, in summarising the conclusions which the preparation of a recent memorandum on the population, industry, and |