ic authority,
and the right to issue money is recognized as one of the important
attributes of sovereignty.

Meanwhile there has been a change in the character of the medium of
exchange. Credit and not money is employed to adjust most of the
relations between economic groups. In 1920, for example, the total
amount of money in circulation in the United States, including gold,
silver, and all forms of paper money was only 6,088 millions of dollars,
while the bank-clearings--that is, the exchange of checks between
banks--totaled 462,920 millions of dollars. If to these figures are
added the volume of checks drawn and accepted on the same bank, the
amount of commercial paper discounted, etc., some idea may be obtained
of the importance of credit transactions as compared with the use of
cash under the present system. Nevertheless, while the right to issue
money has become a public function, the right to issue credit remains in
the hands of private bankers.

Under a producers' society, the relation between the various groups of
producers will be maintained through a system of book-keeping that will
charge against each economic group what it uses in the form of raw
materials, machinery and the like, and will credit each group with the
value of its product. Such a system is in vogue in any large industrial
plant, where each department keeps its own accounts, charges the other
departments with what they get from it and credits them with what they
receive. The whole is handled through a central book-keeping system.
The principle of social book-keeping is not new, therefore, but is an
essential link in any large and complex economic organization. It merely
remains to apply the principle to producers' groups instead of to the
affairs of a private banker or to the book-keeping system of some great
industrial trust.

How shall a joint control be exercised by all of the producers' groups
over those economic activities, such as the handling of credit, or
social book-keeping, that affect more than one of them? The obvious
answer is that they can be transacted through some organization in which
all of the groups participate on a footing of economic equality.

Common, interests will sooner or later compel common action, or action
through a joint board. The point has been reached in the economic
history of the world where some such common action of the producing
groups is vitally essential to their continued well-being. The logic of
e