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.
THE TRUE MONEY STANDARD.
The true money standard of any country is not the material of which the money is made. The standard is not a concrete object, but a numerical relation. It is the relation between the number of units composing the monetary circulation of the country and the numbers of the population.