However, suppose you have gotten together five pounds in a Savings Bank.  That is to say in the funds.  This is a great deal for you, though it is not half so much as you are compelled to give to the Boroughmongers in one year.  This is a great sum.  It is much more than you ever will have; but suppose you have it.  It is in the funds, mind.  And now let me tell you what the funds are; which is necessary if you have not read my little book called Paper against Gold. The funds is no place at all, Jack.  It is nothing, Jack.  It is moonshine.  It is a lie, a bubble, a fraud, a cheat, a humbug.  And it is all these in the most perfect degree.  People think that the funds is a place where money is kept.  They think that it is a place which contains that which they have deposited.  But the fact is, that the funds is a word which means nothing that the most of the people think it means.  It means the descriptions of the several sorts of the debt.  Suppose I owed money to a tailor, to a smith, to a shoemaker, to a carpenter, and that I had their several bills in my house.  I should in the language of the Boroughmongers, call these bills my funds.  The Boroughmongers owe some people annuities at three pounds for a hundred; some at four pounds for a hundred; some at five pounds for a hundred; and these annuities, or debts they call their funds.  And, Jack, if the Savings Bank people lend them a good parcel of money, they will have that money in these debts or funds.  They will be owners of some of those debts which never will and never can be paid.

But what is this money too in which you are to be paid back again?  It is no money.  It is paper; and though that paper will pass just at this time; it will not long pass, I can assure you, Jack.  When you have worked a fortnight, and get a pound note for it, you set a high value upon the note, because it brings you food.  But suppose nobody would take the note from you.  Suppose no one would give you anything in exchange for it.  You would go back to Farmer Gripe and fling the note in his face.  You would insist upon real money, and you would get it, or you would tear down his house.  This is what will happen, Jack, in a very short time.

I will explain to you, Jack, how this matter stands.  Formerly bank-notes were as good as real money, because anybody that had one might go at any moment, and get real money for it at the Bank.  But now the thing is quite changed.  The Bank broke some years ago; that is to say, it could not pay its notes in real money; and it never has been able to do it from that time to this; and what is more, it never can do it again.  To be sure the paper passes at present.  You take it for your work, and others take it of you for bread and tea.  But the time may be, and I believe is, very near at hand, when this paper will not pass at all; and then as the Boroughmongers and the Savings Bank people have, and can have, no real money, how are you to get your five pounds back again?