I. William Paterson, 1658-1719......with portrait III. Sir William Forbes, 1739-1806...with portrait 37 IV. David Ricardo, 1772-1823.......with portrait V.-William Barnes Rhodes, 1772-1826..... VI.-William Roscoe, 1753-1831......with portrait VII. Francis Baily, 1774-1844... VIII. Barnard Barton, 1784-1849....with portrait with portrait of Lord Avebury XI.-Fitz-Greene Halleck, 1790-1867. with portraits 82 XII.-George Grote, 1794-1871.......with portrait 93 XIII.-Charles Sprague, 1791-1874...with portrait 96 IF PART I HISTORICAL SIDELIGHTS we would begin with the beginning of the literature of banking, we must go back to the Chinese, with whom so many good things originated. The first known work on finance is "The Examination of Currency," by the Chinese banker, Ma-twan-lin, published in 1321. In the highly poetical language of the Flowery Kingdom, bank notes were by him called "flying money." Some of us still find the term singularly appropriate! Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, and Sir John Mandeville, in the fourteenth, pioneers in the literature of travel, tell of the fiat money banker, Kublai Khan, showing that the autocrat of the East anticipated our modern fiatists by nearly seven centuries. Polo quaintly adds to his description: "Now you have heard the ways and means whereby the great Khan may have, and, in fact, has, more treasure than all the kings in the world." Naturally enough, this fiat system of financing an empire and its emperor led to abuses. Mandeville, who followed Polo to Tartary, says: |