The Banknote and the Fiduciary Issue.

This change in the position of the Bank of England note is highly important. It is due, not to any action by the Bank of England, but to an external process arising out of the development of the other joint stock banks and the rapidity with which they have multiplied offices, sowing their banking crop all over the country. By means of it the Bank of England note has largely ceased to be an instrument of credit passed from hand to hand in the course of commercial transactions, and has become part of the cash on which the other banks base their credit operations, and multiply the ever-growing volume of the cheque currency which is now, to an overwhelming extent, the money of modern England. This development has greatly modified the views of the commercial community on the subject of the regulations imposed by Peel's Act of 1844 on the issue of the Bank of England note. By this Act the note issue could only be increased beyond a certain point by the holding of actual bullion against each new note issued. As long as the Bank of England note was currency required for business circulation, this restriction was open to criticism as the infliction of a cast-iron fetter where elasticity was most of all desirable; and the advantages of the German system, which provided for an expansion in the issue of notes against securities—fiduciary issue as it is generally called—when money is in great demand, was frequently held up as an example for England. But now that it is more clearly perceived that the money of England is the cheque, which can be multiplied to an extent which is only limited by the prudence of bankers and the security that their customers may be able to provide, and that the Bank of England note is chiefly used as part of the banking cash reserve, the opinion is commonly held in the City that the restrictions on its issue imposed by Peel's Act should be carried still further, and that that part of the issue which is fiduciary, or based on securities, should gradually be abolished, the securities behind it being replaced by gold. Since most of the profit on the fiduciary issue goes to the Government the difficulty of introducing any change tending towards its abolition is redoubled; but as a matter of theory it is safe to say that a majority of well-informed City opinion is now in favour of making the Bank of England note a pure and simple bullion certificate. And this change of opinion concerning the only law which seriously restricts the banker in the conduct of his business is striking evidence of the extent to which English banking has been modified by the development of the use of the cheque.

It has been revolutionised rather than modified, for the cheque has freed banking from the fetters of the Bank Act. The Bank Act said that there should be no increase in the note currency except by an increase in the Bank of England's bullion. If commerce had continued to use the note currency and had expanded as it has, there would by this time have been a vast pile of useless gold in the Bank's vaults. But the Act laid no restriction on the drawing of cheques, and all the new joint stock banks, which had sprung up when it was discovered that banking did not necessarily mean note-issuing, pushed on the use of the cheque currency wherever they carried their victories. They thus developed that side of banking which was free from legal restriction and at the same time gave the commercial community the most perfectly safe, elastic, and adaptable form of currency that the world has yet seen. And in another respect the growth of these great institutions which have carried out this important development has modified in a very important respect the problem of the money market as it showed itself to Bagehot. When he wrote, the Bank of England was at al ordinary times the most important factor in the market. "At all ordinary moments," he wrote, "there is not money enough in Lombard Street to discount all the bills in Lombard Street without taking some money from the Bank of England." This is no longer true.