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 during the war you find the £18,450,000 of Bank of England fiduciary issue maintaining its dignified immobility, while, at the same time the country was gradually being bespattered with a mass of paper money issued not by the Bank of England but by the Government. From the point of view of the Bank of England's prestige and even of the English Money Market as a whole it is possible that this fact may have been to some extent useful. Mankind wears such queer blinkers in looking at monetary matters that it is quite possible that some day the London Money Market may be able to point with pride to the fact that although paper money was poured out with a wanton hand during war it was a liability of the Government, and the Bank of England and the Money Market really had nothing to do with it. In fact this legend is already extant. So well informed an authority as Mr. Benjamin Strong, Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told a Commission of the American Congress in August 1921, that "the Bank Act was not suspended in England" at the beginning of the war. None