ABSTRACT
The aggregation of money (cash), even the money of the industrial workers, into potentially productive masses, had already made some progress when the modern Money Market came into being. The landowner and the capitalist-entrepreneur no longer had a monopoly of such banking facilities as were available. The primeval instinct of hoarding survives longest in the class which is, for the time being, lowest in the social scale, and mistrustful of those higher up. When instinct gives place to reason, under the stimulus of a better social environment, money (cash) is transformed from a barren store of value into a phalanx of fecundity, because hoarding is superseded by the deposit account. The change, at the lower extremity of the social scale, is clearly discernible before the end of the eighteenth century. The crowd around Forbes’s Bank in 1797 1 consisted of “Fishwomen, carmen, street porters, and butchers’ men ” clamorously demanding payment of their interest receipts. The process of transformation from hoard to deposit–not always an interest-bearing deposit 2 –went on (though not without interruption) 270through all the Napoleonic turmoil. “ What class of the community is it that makes the smallest deposits ? ” said the Select Committee on Promissory Notes in Scotland and Ireland (1826) to a Scottish witness. “ They are generally the labouring classes in towns like Glasgow,” said he. “ In country places like Perth and Aberdeen it 271is from servants and fishermen, and just that class of the community who save from their earnings in mere trifles." 1 When the money was finally withdrawn it was to purchase a house or engage in business. Shyly, but surely, it was issuing from the retreats whither fear had driven it for centuries past, and where millions, doubtless, still lie hid, 272never to be discovered till they are melted for the last great assay.
