The figures of the banking business and the Savings Bank
returns are also remarkable. The Daily Mail on Thursday quoted a well-known financier as saying "Pro- sperity has outstripped. capital. There is not enough money to go round." By which, of course, he meant that bankers' money is scarce, as it always is when trade is flourishing. Perhaps money in this sense has never been so scarce. In the United States recently call money rose to 20 per cent. A notable fact, the writer says, is the amount of gold shipped this year from Great Britain to the United. States and Germany to adjust our trading accounts with them. The British response to a great growth of trade in the United States, or in any other country, is always sensitive and prompt. It is an idle superstition that the prosperity of other countries is achieved at our expense. The Bankers' Clearing House figures, which show day by day the amount drawn through the London banks by cheque, indicate for the year an excess over the preceding year of £1,090,299,000. As for the Savings Bank Report which was issued on Wednesday, it goes only to the end of last year, but its figures sufficiently foreshadow the " boom " which has since come. For 1911 the deposits rose from £46,205,870 to £50,102,531, and the excess of deposits over withdrawals rose from almost nothing to three and a half millions sterling.
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