I was glad to find that the members of the Commercial Convention in Boston of last February were generally readers of this magazine.

In view of the discussion which occupies public attention as to the resumption of money payments, it may be instructive to consider whether any legislation or any voluntary action of the public is likely to bring it about. I may as well say in advance that I do not think it is.

The following hypothetical case presents an interesting problem in bookkeeping, and a very instructive example in political economy. I find it in Gouge’s Journal of Banking published in Philadelphia, July 21, 1841.

What is repudiation? What is a dollar? What is money?

Mr. Walker contributes to Lippincott’s Magazine of December last an article to show the damaging character of the legislation of Congress on the currency, during the session of 1869-70, as leading away from the assumption of specie payments, and tending altogether to expansion.

There is an abnormal effect on price, and, hence, injustice in the distribution of wealth, in the tariff system of taxation, apart from the contested principle of protection, as distinct from revenue, which ought to remove that system from our national policy.

Once in my life, and only once, have I known a bank officer who seemed to me to comprehend thoroughly the nature of his business in discounting an evidence of debt out of itself into a “deposit.” That officer was the late J.

There are merchants who say that, in buying goods with a bank note or check drawn on a discount deposit, they do the same thing in principle as in buying on a banker’s letter of credit. They are mistaken. The difference between the two instruments is world-wide; it is the difference between a lie and the truth.

The late William M. Gouge, one of the best political economists of the United States, says, in his History of Banking, “Nothing is more certain than political economy.

Two elements determine the value of money, as the true measure of price; one is the volume of currency, estimated in gold, in relation to the quantity of circulating capital; the other is the rapidity of circulation.