Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: - CHAPTER II. CASH AND CREDIT Everybody is familiar with the terms " Cash and Credit," as ordinarily used and understood. In cash transactions delivery and payment are simultaneous, while in credit transactions payment is more or less deferred. Accepting this distinction for the present, let each reader reckon up how much in coins, bills, and notes, i.e., actual money, passes out of or into his hands in connection with his business, his investments, and his household and personal expenditures, then let him compute what amounts are represented by checks, collections or payments by others, offsets in accounts, etc., and he will be surprised to find how small a proportion the former amount bears to the latter. If anyone, after making these computations, will compare results with two other persons, one whose aggregate receipts and expenditures are greater, and another in whose case the amounts are less than in his, he will find that the more a man receives and pays the smaller is the percentage of actual money handled by him. The immense transactions in stocks, exchange, and merchandise at New York, London, and other great centres, are allsettled by checks, and these checks axe settled again through clearing-houses, so that very little money passes even in the final adjustment of balances. It is highly probable that if every coin, note, and bank-bill in any given community at some moment of time could be located, much the larger part in amount, outside of what is in bank and in the tills of tradesmen, refreshment places, and railroad offices, would be found in the possession of the poorer families. Of course there is no way of verifying this conjecture, but it rests on these grounds: 1st. The poorer families generally include a decided majority of the community. 2d. ...