money of account,
referring to a well understood standard of value. The importance of this
standard in reference to deferred payments has already been referred to.
It cannot be overestimated. But any estimate of the currency needed, or to
be needed for the transaction of business, founded upon the amount of
deferred payments, is wholly fallacious.

It is equally wrong to suppose that the bankers are the principal
money-lenders. The real lenders are those who have sold their produce, the
use of their tools or their time, at a price to be paid next week, next
month or next year. Every man who has wages due him is as truly a
money-lender, to the extent of the wages due, as any banker who accepts a
promise to pay in the future for service or value given in the present.
Even where the borrowed articles have been consumed or wasted, the promise
to pay is simply a promise to return so much of value as the articles
received were estimated to be worth. This may be easily seen in thinking
of a running account at the store for the ordinary supplies of the family.
It may amount to five hundred dollars, if one's credit is sufficient, and
seem only the actual articles used, and yet to be paid for; but if settled
by a note fixing a future definite time of payment, the debt at once
becomes in thought borrowed money, though no change whatever has been made
in the actual facts. If the same purchases had been made by means of
credit at the bank, gained by discounting a personal note, the same
articles exactly would have been borrowed, the bank instead of the
merchant being the lender. In all probability the bank has been the means
in the first case of enabling the merchant to meet these current wants on
credit, for he himself has gained the credit of the bank by discounting
his own note. In either case the bank has been the means of serving both
the borrower and the lender. It is simply a machine for accommodating
both.

_Legal tender._--All forms of deferred payments imply the possible
intervention in final settlement of the force of government. While the
great mass of promises to pay are met without an appeal to laws or courts,
the whole is put in such form by customs of society as to involve the
possibility of such arbitration. Government takes no note of debts which
cannot be proved in court, and the forms of legal proof are well settled.
All the formalities of credit in systems of book-keeping, forms of notes
and bonds, and wording