we must unavoidably depend for a maintenance of its due value
upon the adoption of a strict and judicious rule for the
regulation of its amount.
Lord Overstone further declared that:
The value of the paper currency results from its being kept at
the same amount the metallic currency would have been.
Alexander Baring, in his evidence before the secret committee of the
House of Lords in 1819, said:
The reduction of paper would produce all those effects which
arise from the reduction in the amount of money in any country.
Prof. F. A. Walker says:
Let me repeat, money is to be known by its doing a certain work.
Money is not gold, though gold may be money; sometimes gold is
money, and sometimes it is not. Money is no one thing, no group
of many things having any material property in common. On the
contrary, anything may be money; and anything, in a given time
and place, is money which then and there performs a certain
function. Always and everywhere that which does the money-work
is the money-thing.
Sir Archibald Alison says:
The suspension of specie payment in 1797, making bank notes a
legal tender receivable for taxes by providing Great Britain with
an adequate internal currency, averted the catastrophe then so
general upon the Continent, and gave it at the same time an
extraordinary degree of prosperity. Such was the commencement of
the paper system in Great Britain, which ultimately produced such
astonishing effects, and brought the struggle [of the Napoleonic
wars] to a triumphant close.