428 
Annual Report of the 
Bonamy Price says:— 
u How many hats are wanted in the nation? Count the heads. 
Hatters do not make hats on the principle of ten apiece. How 
many ships are wanted between Eng'land and America? Count the 
passengers. How many pairs of shoes? Count the pairs of feet. 
It is just so with bank-notes; more will not circulate than are 
wanted.” 
Are banks any more competent to count the heads, the passen¬ 
gers or the feet, than the men who own the heads and the feet and 
are the passengers? 
Over the well-known and deservedly trusted initials of J. S. R., 
we read in J. M. Forbes 1 Financial Record for June, 1874: “If 
money is to be the real medium of exchange and measure of value, 
you can no more determine by legislation how much money a com¬ 
munity needs, or can have, than how many horses, or coaches, or 
cars, or railroads, or yard-sticks. Whoever wants it will, of course, 
have it, if he can afford to pay for it,—otherwise he must do with¬ 
out it. 11 
Good sound democratic doctrine that—from abullionist, too. Who 
can settle about horses, coaches, cars and yard-sticks better than 
the makers and users of them ? 
There is a curious oversight in this cry of inflation. We forget 
that the nation doubles its population in thirty years; that it adds, 
therefore, something like a million to its population annually. Of 
course the sufficient currency of 1870 must be too small for 1876; 
yet because we have more currency now than in 1860, men hold up 
hands of horror and cry “ Inflation. 11 What mother ever tries to 
force on a boy of twelve years the jacket made for him when he was 
six? If he should resist the cramping and demand ampler meas¬ 
ures, would there be any reason for his brothers and sisters, and 
aunts, to clamor him down with the cry of “ Inflation?” 
Do you say prices would rise? Agreed. Not in proportion, 
however, to the loans; that is a fallacy which Tooke’s History of 
Prices and Gibbons’ Table of Prices disprove. Wages would rise; 
so would raw products. All manufactured articles would finally 
fall. 
As to this matter of prices and currency, every one knows that 
the price of an article here is fixed by its price in the central mar¬ 
kets of the world,—in Liverpool and London. If flour is cheaper in 
