VIEWS ON BANKING. 123 



itself to set me on my metal. There was, however, at 

 least one item in my calculations in which I almost always 

 found myself incorrect. I found I could predict every 

 bankruptcy in the district ; but I usually fell short from 

 ten to eighteen months of the period in which the event 

 actually took place. I could pretty nearly determine the 

 time when the difficulties and entanglements which I 

 saw ought to have produced their proper effects, and 

 landed in failure ; but I missed taking into account the 

 desperate efforts which men of energetic temperament 

 make in such circumstances, and which, to the signal 

 injury of their friends and the loss of their creditors, 

 succeed usually in staving off the catastrophe for a 

 season.' 



When the financial policy of Sir Robert Peel threat- 

 ened the one pound note circulation of Scotland with 

 extinction, Miller took part strongly with those who 

 opposed the measure. His views found expression in 

 a series of newspaper articles on Sir Robert Peel's Scotch 

 currency scheme, which were republished in the form 

 of a pamphlet entitled Words of Warning to the People 

 of Scotland. Having carefully examined this little work, 

 I am bound to admit that the writer appears to -me to 

 have failed to appreciate with perfect accuracy and lucidity 

 the distinction between wealth and the machinery by 

 which wealth is exchanged. That he erred with some 

 of the shrewdest men the world has seen with Benjamin 

 Franklin, for example, and Sir Walter Scott is un- 

 questionable, but the error does not change its nature 

 on that account. A passage which Miller quotes from 

 Franklin, with the italics as Miller inserts them, will 

 show wherein, as I conceive, all orthodox economists of 

 the present day would declare both men in the wrong. 

 ' The truth is,' wrote Franklin, ' that the balance of 



