value, and intrinsically worth more than current money.  It was at the same time enacted, that all bills drawn upon or negotiated at Amsterdam of the value of six hundred guilders and upwards should be paid in bank money, which at once took away all uncertainty in the value of those bills.  Every merchant, in consequence of this regulation, was obliged to keep an account with the bank in order to pay his foreign bills of exchange, which necessarily occasioned a certain demand for bank money.’

Again, a most important function of early banks is one which the present banks retain, though it is subsidiary to their main use; viz. the function of remitting money.  A man brings money to the bank to meet a payment which he desires to make at a great distance, and the bank, having a connection with other banks, sends it where it is wanted.  As soon as bills of exchange are given upon a large scale, this remittance is a very pressing requirement.  Such bills must be made payable at a place convenient to the seller of the goods in payment of which they are given, perhaps at the great town where his warehouse is.  But this may be very far from the retail shop of the buyer who bought those goods to sell them again in the country.  For these, and a multitude of purposes, the instant and regular remittance of money is an early necessity of growing trade; and that remittance it was a first object of early banks to accomplish.

These are all uses other than those of deposit banking which banks supplied that afterwards became in our English sense deposit banks.  By supplying these uses, they gained the credit that afterwards enabled them to gain a living as deposit banks.  Being trusted for one purpose, they came to be trusted for a purpose quite different, ultimately far more important, though at first less keenly pressing.  But these wants only affect a few persons, and therefore bring the bank under the notice of a few only.  The real introductory function which deposit banks at first perform is much more popular, and it is only when they can perform this more popular kind of business that deposit banking ever spreads quickly and extensively.  This function is the supply of the paper circulation to the country, and it will be observed that I am not about to overstep my limits and discuss this as a question of currency.  In what form the best paper currency can be supplied to a country is a question of economical theory with which I do not meddle here.  I am only narrating unquestionable history, not dealing with an argument where every step is disputed.  And part of this certain history is that the best way to diffuse banking in a community is to allow the banker to issue banknotes of small amount that can supersede the metal currency.  This amounts to a subsidy to each banker to enable him to keep open a bank till depositors choose to come to it.  The country where deposit banking is most diffused is Scotland, and there the original profits were entirely